The transcriptome of Darwin's bark spider silk glands predicts proteins contributing to dragline silk toughness

Communications Biology
Jessica E GarbTodd A Blackledge

Abstract

Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini) produces giant orb webs from dragline silk that can be twice as tough as other silks, making it the toughest biological material. This extreme toughness comes from increased extensibility relative to other draglines. We show C. darwini dragline-producing major ampullate (MA) glands highly express a novel silk gene transcript (MaSp4) encoding a protein that diverges markedly from closely related proteins and contains abundant proline, known to confer silk extensibility, in a unique GPGPQ amino acid motif. This suggests C. darwini evolved distinct proteins that may have increased its dragline's toughness, enabling giant webs. Caerostris darwini's MA spinning ducts also appear unusually long, potentially facilitating alignment of silk proteins into extremely tough fibers. Thus, a suite of novel traits from the level of genes to spinning physiology to silk biomechanics are associated with the unique ecology of Darwin's bark spider, presenting innovative designs for engineering biomaterials.

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Citations

Jan 22, 2020·Genome Biology and Evolution·Chao TongTimothy A Linksvayer
Feb 6, 2020·Macromolecular Rapid Communications·Na KongYuan Yao
Feb 13, 2020·Molecules : a Journal of Synthetic Chemistry and Natural Product Chemistry·Sahar SalehiThomas Scheibel
Dec 5, 2020·International Journal of Biological Macromolecules·Shi-Yi ZhouHui Xiang
Jan 21, 2021·ACS Nano·Jan Johansson, Anna Rising

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
dissections
RNA-Seq
ICE
ion-exchange chromatography

Software Mentioned

tBLASTn
MUSCLE
Salmon
RS
CD
ImageJ
CDhit
Diamond
Geneious
Cluster

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