A photo from open sources
The web, as a surprisingly durable natural material, is given interested in scientists who are well aware that by creating something like artificial, you can use such threads in medicine, construction, aircraft manufacturing and many other areas human activity, even in culture.
The most durable web is a network of poisonous spiders, for example, a black widow. That’s why it’s precisely these arthropods that rather, their threads have long haunted researchers. And on a few days ago a team of scientists at San Diego State University and Northwestern University of the United States said that they managed to solve the mystery of the heavy-duty web of black widows.
The fact is that previous knowledge of the composition of amino acids in the formation of proteins from which spiders twist their threads, turned out to be insufficient, that is, copying did not match prototype, which is why researchers previously could not get something like a natural web. American scientists using spectroscopy of nuclear magnetic resonance managed to look inside spider protein gland at the level of the “spinning channel”, thanks why they realized that the black widow creates her heavy-duty threads on the basis of a hierarchically organized protein nanocomplex, rather than from spherical protein micelles, as previously thought.
By identifying such an error from previous research, American experts are sure that they are close to creating a prototype of the web of the black widow, and this promises in the future big dividends, since the practical use of this discoveries are limitless!
