ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2013
Increasing silk fibre strength through heterogeneity of bundled fibrils.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Meta-analysis reveals materiomic relationships in major ampullate silk across the spider phylogeny.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Pooled it
- Progress in Multiscale Modeling of Silk Materials.Biomacromolecules · 2024Review
- Silk-Based Biomaterials for Designing Bioinspired Microarchitecture for Various Biomedical Applications.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Rapid molecular diversification and homogenization of clustered major ampullate silk genes in Argiope garden spiders.PLoS genetics · 2022Article
- Atomistic Simulation of Water Incorporation and Mobility inACS omega · 2021Article
- Stretching ofMolecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Structure of Animal Silks.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2021Article
- Tensegrity Modelling and the High Toughness of Spider Dragline Silk.Nanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Recent Advances in Development of Functional Spider Silk-Based Hybrid Materials.Frontiers in chemistry · 2020Review
- Design, Fabrication, and Function of Silk-Based Nanomaterials.Advanced functional materials · 2018Article
- Biopolymer nanofibrils: structure, modeling, preparation, and applications.Progress in polymer science · 2018Article
- Article
- Polymorphic regenerated silk fibers assembled through bioinspired spinning.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Silk Spinning in Silkworms and Spiders.International journal of molecular sciences · 2016Review
- Unpicking the signal thread of the sector web spider Zygiella x-notata.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2015Article
- Intrinsic tensile properties of cocoon silk fibres can be estimated by removing flaws through repeated tensile tests.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2015Article
- Stochastic mechanical degradation of multi-cracked fiber bundles with elastic and viscous interactions.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2015Article
- Compliant threads maximize spider silk connection strength and toughness.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Can naturally arising disorder in biological materials be beneficial? Materials scientists are continuously attempting to replicate the exemplary performance of materials such as spider silk, with detailed techniques and assembly procedures. At the same time, a spider does not precisely machine silk-imaging indicates that its fibrils are heterogeneous and irregular in cross section. While past investigations either focused on the building material (e.g. the molecular scale protein sequence and behaviour) or on the ultimate structural component (e.g. silk threads and spider webs), the bundled structure of fibrils that compose spider threads has been frequently overlooked. Herein, I exploit a molecular dynamics-based coarse-grain model to construct a fully three-dimensional fibril bundle, with a length on the order of micrometres. I probe the mechanical behaviour of bundled silk fibrils with variable density of heterogenic protrusions or globules, ranging from ideally homogeneous to a saturated distribution. Subject to stretching, the model indicates that cooperativity is enhanced by contact through low-force deformation and shear 'locking' between globules, increasing shear stress transfer by up to 200 per cent. In effect, introduction of a random and disordered structure can serve to improve mechanical performance. Moreover, addition of globules allows a tuning of free volume, and thus the wettability of silk (with implications for supercontraction). These findings support the ability of silk to maintain near-molecular-level strength at the scale of silk threads, and the mechanism could be easily adopted as a strategy for synthetic fibres.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.