spider silk

Spider silk is an incredible material!
Check out our new paper at Physical Review Letters:

Spider silk is a protein material that exhibits extraordinary and nontrivial properties such as the ability to soften and decrease its length by up to ∼60% upon exposure to high humidity. This counter-intuitive process is commonly called supercontraction and is the result of a transition from a highly oriented glassy phase to a disoriented rubbery phase. In our new paper (published in biomacromolecules) we derive a model that explains the origins of the supercontraction phenomena. The insights from this work motivate the development of novel biomimetic materials.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.9b01983

Beta-sheet protein structures and domains are widely found in biological materials such as silk. These assemblies play amajor role in the extraordinary strength and unique properties of biomaterials.  In our new work, we employ simple Langevin-based models to investigate the behavior and the collapse of these structures.