Spiders can produce up to 7 different types of silk for various purposes ranging from wrapping prey to building webs. Silks produced by spiders have dramatically different mechanical properties that have been tuned to suit various applications. Dragline spider silk has been the main focus of spider silk research because of its remarkable mechanical properties. Understanding the relationship between the structure of spider silks and their mechanical properties should aid in the development of synthetic spider silk mimics in the future. Amino acid analysis (AAA), is an analytical method that involves the breaking down of proteins into their amino acids and quantifying how much of each amino acid is present. To achieve this, spider silks were collected, then the spider silk proteins were hydrolyzed using concentrated hydrochloric acid, and the amino acids were quantified via liquid-state NMR. AAA was used to determine the amino acid composition of a range of different types of spider silk that were collected from different species of spiders.

Characterization of spider silks using NMR amino acid analysis

2019 Fall National Meeting

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