Objective
Natural silks have outstanding properties, which have lead to rapidly growing interests from a wide range of industries. Thus, spider silks in particular have become benchmarks for futuristic polymer design not least because, in a world demanding sustainability, these silks are not only of superb quality but are also produced cheaply, economically and ecologically from aqueous solvents under ambient temperatures and 'impossibly' low pressures. It has, with huge investments, become possible to produce recombinant silk peptides in a number of host systems.
However, major barriers remain for man's ability to match the native animal silk-protein feedstocks and fibres, which we still do not understand sufficiently. Recent work suggests that the extreme toughness o f some spider threads does not depend solely on the folding of the major component protein but also on the hierarchical structure of the multi-protein thread. For folding and hierarchy the spider's complex spinning process plays a major role.
The known facts indicate that the generation of the fibres and their structural organization is the result of a complex interaction of mechanical stress, biochemical properties of the liquid spinning dope and physiological processes that may actively regulate them. Yet, the investigation of spider silks so far mainly concentrated on the aspects within the expertise of the given research groups. SSExSy will transfer and integrate knowledge about the biochemistry, molecular biology and histochemistry of spider silks to a world wide leading group in measuring the physical properties of silk and spinning dope.
This will create new expertise in studying the complex interactions from the level of proteins and protein domains to structural organisation and resulting mechanical properties. Subsequently, it will allow the full assessment of the requirements for biomimetic fibre production.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringfibers
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- natural scienceschemical sciencespolymer sciences
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmolecular biology
You need to log in or register to use this function
Call for proposal
FP6-2002-MOBILITY-3
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
TOK - Marie Curie actions-Transfer of KnowledgeCoordinator
OXFORD
United Kingdom