A common British spider could help scientists create incredibly long fibers that are only a few nanometers thick.
Most spiders spin threads that are several micrometers thick, but the spectacular "garden centre spider" or "feather-legged lace weaver" Uloborus plumipes can spin them much thinner, the University of Oxford reported.
A research team now believes they have gained a deeper understanding of how the spiders accomplish this feat in a findings that could have implications for the commercial spinning of nano-scale filaments.
To make their findings the researchers collected adult female Uloborus lace weavers from garden centres in Hampshire, U.K. and took photographs and videos of them spinning their silk using three different microscopy techniques.
"Uloborus has unique cribellar glands, amongst the smallest silk glands of any spider, and it's these that yield the ultra-fine 'catching wool' of its prey capture thread," said Katrin Kronenberger of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, the report's first author. "The raw material, silk dope, is funnelled through exceptionally narrow and long ducts into tiny spinning nozzles or spigots. Importantly, the silk seems to form only just before it emerges at the uniquely-shaped spigots of this spider."
To spin their webs the spiders produce thousands of filaments from "spigots" in the gland and comb them out using the hair on their back legs. The violent pulling of the thread charges the fibers, and an electrostatic interaction occurs, causing sticky wool-like "puffs" to cover the captured threads.
Synthetic polymer fibers are generally created through a process of hot-melt extrusion, which generally come out to be 10 micrometers or above, but these new findings could help thin them down.
"Studying this spider is giving us valuable insights into how it creates nano-scale filaments," said Fritz Vollrath of Oxford University's Department of Zoology. "If we could reproduce its neat trick of electro-spinning nano-fibres we could pave the way for a highly versatile and efficient new kind of polymer processing technology."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Biology Letters.
