Regensburg 2007 – scientific programme

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MM: Fachverband Metall- und Materialphysik

MM 35: SYBM Bioinspired Materials

MM 35.12: Talk

Thursday, March 29, 2007, 18:00–18:15, H16

Recombinantly produced Spider Silk in a Microfluidic Device — •Sebastian Rammensee¹, Ute Slotta², David Keerl², Thomas Scheibel², and Andreas Bausch¹ — ¹Technische Universität München, Physik-Department E22-Biophysik, James-Franck-Strasse 1, 85747 Garching — ²Technische Universität München, Department Chemie, Lichtenbergstrasse 4, 85747 Garching

Spider Silks are protein materials which show mechanical properties being superior to all man-made materials in regard to toughness and elasticity. However, commercial applications of natural spider silk are complicated by the highly cannibalistic and territorial behavior of spiders. This problem can be circumvented by recombinant production of spider silk analogous proteins in bacteria. In vivo, the highly complex spinning process is performed in a specialized organ, being a topic of current research. We study the process of silk fiber formation in microfluidic devices under laminar flow conditions, where mixing occurs only by diffusion. As we have a whole set of recombinantly produced spider silk analogous proteins available for experiments, the influence of different structural features of the proteins on fiber formation can be studied. We present secondary structure information obtained by infrared spectroscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy images of the produced silk assemblies. We model the elongational flow in the microfluidic channel by Finite Element Simulations, and thus correlate the structure and mechanical properties of the resulting silk structures with the conditions in the spinning channel.