How researchers leveled up worm silk to be tougher than a spider's

Spiders usually produce the strongest threads of all the silk-making animals.

The scientists behind this latest paper took a different approach: spinning the silk from worms as a spider might.

Silkworm silk typically consists of protein fibers sheathed in a glue-like substance. That glue helps the silk fibers stick together in cocoons, but it’s an impediment to spinning it. So it had to go. The researchers did so by bathing the fibers in an acid calledThe process injected the resultant fibers into another bath, this one filled with zinc and iron ions that joined to the silk and strengthened it.

After drying the threads, the researchers were left with silk that didn’t just match spider dragline silk in tensile strength. It went beyond. In testing, they found that the silk they’d just created—identical to spider dragline silk in appearance—was 70 percent stronger. It was also more than twice as strong as a silkworm’s natural silk, stripped of its glue.“Our finding reverses the previous perception that silkworm silk cannot compete with spider silks on mechanical performance,” says Lin.

The process, according to Schniepp, isn’t entirely new. Silk-scientists have been tinkering with ways to refine the properties of silkworm silk. But they’ve never been able to create “a silkworm silk that outperforms spider silk—that is definitely not something that I expected to be, in a way, so easy,” Schniepp says.

This approach won’t solve all the problems behind making silk in bulk. You’d still need to get your silk from silkworms, rather than growing proteins in a lab, as some attempts seek. HFIP, moreover, isn’t really suitable for mass production; it’s both expensive and quite toxic.

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