Relatore: dott. Kazuharu Arakawa della Keio University (Giappone).

Spider silks are proteins that exhibit extraordinary mechanical properties including high tensile strengths, extensibilities, and exceptional toughness, with potential applications in industry as renewable materials. Spiders produce multiple types of silk, each composed of specific proteins called spidroins and exhibiting a diverse range of mechanical properties, most of which are known to be monophyletic. Therefore, if we can obtain a multitude of spidroin sequences along with the mechanical properties of corresponding silks from diverse samples among the order Araneae, we can potentially identify quantitative linkages between sequence motifs and physical properties. To this end, we have sequenced 1,000 spiders using de novo transcriptome sequencing and assembly strategy, with comprehensive measurement of the mechanical properties of their dragline silks. In this talk, I would like to discuss our findings regarding the link between spidroin sequences and their mechanical properties.