The transcriptome of Darwin's bark spider silk glands predicts proteins contributing to dragline silk toughness.
Commun Biol
; 2: 275, 2019.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-31372514
ABSTRACT
Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini) produces giant orb webs from dragline silk that can be twice as tough as other silks, making it the toughest biological material. This extreme toughness comes from increased extensibility relative to other draglines. We show C. darwini dragline-producing major ampullate (MA) glands highly express a novel silk gene transcript (MaSp4) encoding a protein that diverges markedly from closely related proteins and contains abundant proline, known to confer silk extensibility, in a unique GPGPQ amino acid motif. This suggests C. darwini evolved distinct proteins that may have increased its dragline's toughness, enabling giant webs. Caerostris darwini's MA spinning ducts also appear unusually long, potentially facilitating alignment of silk proteins into extremely tough fibers. Thus, a suite of novel traits from the level of genes to spinning physiology to silk biomechanics are associated with the unique ecology of Darwin's bark spider, presenting innovative designs for engineering biomaterials.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Spiders
/
Insect Proteins
/
Transcriptome
/
Fibroins
Type of study:
Prognostic_studies
/
Risk_factors_studies
Limits:
Animals
Language:
En
Journal:
Commun Biol
Year:
2019
Document type:
Article