Recent developments in artificial spider silk and functional gel fibers
Abdul Qadeer Khan,
Muhammad Shafiq,
Jiatian Li,
Kaiqing Yu,
Zunfeng Liu,
Xiang Zhou,
Meifang Zhu
Affiliations
Abdul Qadeer Khan
Department of Science China Pharmaceutical University Nanjing China
Muhammad Shafiq
Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Graduate School Kyushu University Fukuoka‐shi Japan
Jiatian Li
State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, Key Laboratory of Functional Polymer Materials, Smart Sensing Interdisciplinary Science Center, College of Chemistry Nankai University Tianjin China
Kaiqing Yu
State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, Key Laboratory of Functional Polymer Materials, Smart Sensing Interdisciplinary Science Center, College of Chemistry Nankai University Tianjin China
Zunfeng Liu
State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, Key Laboratory of Functional Polymer Materials, Smart Sensing Interdisciplinary Science Center, College of Chemistry Nankai University Tianjin China
Xiang Zhou
Department of Science China Pharmaceutical University Nanjing China
Meifang Zhu
State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, College of Materials Science and Engineering Donghua University Shanghai China
Abstract It is highly desirable to develop fiber materials with high strength and toughness while increasing fiber strength always results in a decrease in toughness. Spider silk is a natural fiber material with an excellent combination of high strength and toughness, which is produced from the spinning dope solution by gelation and drawing spinning process. This encourages people to prepare artificial fibers by mimicking the material, structure, and spinning of natural spider silk. In this review, we first summarized the preparation of artificial spider silk prepared via such a gelation process from different types of materials, including nonrecombinant proteins, recombinant proteins, polypeptides, synthetic polymers, and polymer nanocomposites. In addition, different spinning approaches for spinning artificial spider silk are also summarized. In the third section, some novel application scenarios of the artificial spider silk were summarized, such as artificial muscles, sensing, and smart fibers.
