CSIRO entomologist (right) Dr Tara Sutherland, who led the Australian researchers, said "silks would be good for tough, lightweight textiles, high strength applications like advanced aviation and marine composites...and also useful in medical applications, sutures, artificial tendons and ligaments."

Bee and ant silk, in contrast to the large protein sheet structure of spiders and moth silk, consist of coiled coils - a protein structural arrangement where multiple helices wind around each other. This structure produces a light weight, very tough silk."


"Honey bee silk was chosen because E. coli can't make long stranded silks like spiders or silk worms make, but can produce the shorter protein strands, made by bees."

To produce their insect silk from E. coli, Sutherland and her colleagues first had to genetically modify the bacteria.

"We had previously identified the honeybee silk genes and knew the silk was encoded by four small non-repetitive genes - a much simpler arrangement which made them excellent candidates for transgenic silk production."

A computer simulation route
In a totally different approach Molecular Biomechanics research group head (right) Dr. Frauke Gräter of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) explores how physical force interacts with molecular processes in computer based methods.

They research the fascinating property of silk, which is more tear-resistant than steel.

The researchers of HITS have – together with colleagues from Shanghai and Stuttgart – published new findings "Silk Fiber Mechanics from Multiscale Force Distribution Analysis" in the Biophysical Journal.



“The article is the result of an interdisciplinary project”, says Frauke Gräter. “We have linked physical modelling of biological problems with engineering techniques. Besides the scientists of HITS, also Dr.-Ing. Bernd Markert (Institute of Mechanics, University of Stuttgart) and researchers of the CAS-MPG Partner Institute of Computational Biology Shanghai have been involved in the project.



Exact physical models can only be computed for very small fragments of silk fiber by computer techniques today. Even for supercomputers it takes months to compute single components.

“We use the results of our own calculations and scale them up to the whole silk fiber, similar to extrapolation,” she explains. “We use methods and techniques of engineers, which are for example used by crash tests.”

Thus, the HITS-scientists can explore with their computer simulations how the whole silk fiber is responsive to mechanical force, if it is pulled for example.

This results in how the main component of the silk protein has to be arranged to achieve optimal breaking strength and elasticity.

“The main components are on the one hand crystalline, thus very ordered, assemblies and on the other hand soft, disordered units.”


Until now, it was presumed the two silk components were  arranged by accident. It is now shown silk is only really tear-resistant, if these components are arranged in continuous slices – “like filmy slices of salami,” she says. 

“Our computer schemes can help polymer chemists to develop new materials which are both tear-resistant and elastic,” Frauke Gräter concludes.