Biologist and curator, professor, and Director of Comparative Biology Research at the American Museum of Natural History Cheryl Hayashi has dedicated her hours to creating a "silk library" in her laboratory at the museum. She has already collected the spider silk glands of 50 spider species, which seems like a lot, but not compared to the at least 48,000 known species of spiders worldwide.
Hayashi began her work 20 years ago by opening the body of a silver garden spider under her microscope. There she saw its silk glands that were responsible for producing the spider webs. Among the hundreds of silk glands that she saw, she observed that the glands looked different from each other, and each of them produced a different type of silk.
She observed how some types of silk were elastic, while the others were stiff. Some possessed a hydrophilic characteristic so they dissolved in water, while some were hydrophobic and they repelled the liquid. "They make so many kinds of silk!" Hayashi said as she expressed her excitement in the matter. "That's just what boggles my mind."
Although Hayashi has been working on her project for 20 years, recently improved technology helped her work on it at a faster pace and in bulk. Before that, if scientists wanted to study the genetic structure of spider silk, they would have to first, chop the DNA of the glands and then rely on a computer to put them back in a proper sequence. Seeing how spiders have very long, repetitive DNA strands, that would be a tedious task to do.
The silk library that Hayashi is building could potentially be a master source of information for the characterization and use of the different types of spider silk. "Any function that we can think of where you need something that requires a lightweight material that's very strong," Hayashi said, "you can look to spider silk." Among many applications, spider silk may be used in a reformulation of various mixtures like pesticides. It may also make up a portion of composite materials that can be used for the design of textiles, from fashionable dresses to bulletproof vests.
