A chemistry team at San Diego State University used NMR to track the silk glands of black widow spiders, finding that liquid silk proteins first gather into semiliquid condensates before solidifying into fibre.
Spider silk is tougher than Kevlar and stronger than steel, yet labs keep failing to replicate it. A team at San Diego State University went after the black widow's silk gland.
They fed the spiders isotopes and used NMR to see two amino acid side groups briefly stick to each other inside the disordered proteins, pushing water out so the proteins condense into semiliquid droplets and finally get drawn into silk.
What surprised me most is that those same two amino acids line up at the bends of the beta sheets in the finished fibre. The spider's protein soup holds a construction plan humans haven't learned to read yet.
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