Researchers try to reinvent silk

New York Times : Researchers have for years been trying to replicate spiders’ silk for use in many different products. Spiders’ silk is not a single material but varies from sticky toothpaste-like mush to strong, stretchy draglines and can be stronger than steel or bulletproof like Kevlar. Recent applications by Tufts University researchers include electrode arrays that are printed on flexible, degradable silk films, which may one day be used to treat epilepsy without producing the scarring that larger implanted electrodes do, and a coil made of silk substrate and gold that can help tell when food goes bad. Yet some of the qualities of actual spiders’ silk, such as the complex ways proteins in natural silk are folded to give each silk its unique properties, still elude researchers.