The child is wearing a belly slip made of silk.

So we've made a silk card with penicillin in it.

Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368.

And then we have silk, Thai silk.

And the most studied silk line of them all major ampullate silk.

Attired in silk and silk embroidery, facing one another.

Attired in silk and silk embroidery, facing one another.

Pyriform silk glands make the attachment cement that's the silk that's used to adhere silk lines to a substrate.

Most spiders use copious amounts of silk, and silk is essential to their survival and reproduction.

Dressed in fine silk and (also) in thick silk, facing each other,

Dressed in fine silk and (also) in thick silk, facing each other,

They produce six different types of silk, which is spun together into a fiber, tougher than any fiber humans have ever made.

So if the web was made entirely out of dragline silk, an insect is very likely to just bounce right off. But by having really, really stretchy capture spiral silk, the web is actually able to absorb the impact of that intercepted prey.

Wear silk socks!

And so we marvel at silk worms the silk worm you see here spinning its fiber.

Cheryl Hayashi The magnificence of spider silk

There are many kinds of spider silk.

Gardens of perpetuity, they shall enter therein they shad be made to wear therein bracelets of gold and pearls, and their dress therein shall be silk.

Gardens of perpetuity, they shall enter therein they shad be made to wear therein bracelets of gold and pearls, and their dress therein shall be silk.

and Polar Silk Road,

China s Silk Road Revival

Silk is very precious.

Each of these silk fibers exits from the spigot, and if you were to trace the fiber back into the spider, what you would find is that each spigot connects to its own individual silk gland. A silk gland kind of looks like a sac with a lot of silk proteins stuck inside.

What you see there on the screen is a human hair superimposed on the needle that's made of silk just to give you a sense of size.

So this material is silk.

What silk biologists do is we try to relate these sequences, these amino acid sequences, to the mechanical properties of the silk fibers.

So silk comes out of the spinnerets, and for those of us spider silk biologists, this is what we call the business end of the spider.

Fiorenzo Omenetto Silk, the ancient material of the future

She is wearing a pair of white, silk socks.

But what, exactly, is spider silk?

Spider silk is almost entirely protein.

She is wearing gorgeous silk clothes.

Nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a single gene family, so this means that the diversity of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family, so presumably the original spider ancestor made one kind of silk, and over the last 380 million years, that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged, specialized, over and over and over again, to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today.

Wearing garments of fine silk and brocade, facing each other.

Wearing garments of fine silk and brocade, facing each other.

The frame and radii of this web is made up of one type of silk, while the capture spiral is a composite of two different silks the filament and the sticky droplet.

These are the two species of spiders for which the vast majority of time and money on synthetic spider silk research has been to replicate their dragline silk proteins.

In an orb web weaving spider, you can find seven types of silk glands, and what I have depicted here in this picture, let's start at the one o'clock position, there's tubuliform silk glands, which are used to make the outer silk of an egg sac.

To give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like, this is a dragline silk protein, it's just a portion of it, from the black widow spider.

merchandise of gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, all expensive wood, every vessel of ivory, every vessel made of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble

merchandise of gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, all expensive wood, every vessel of ivory, every vessel made of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble

How does an individual spider make so many kinds of silk?

Inside each spider, there are hundreds of silk glands, sometimes thousands.

It's short. And on the bottom, this is the repeat sequence for the egg case, or tubuliform silk protein, for the exact same spider. And you can see how dramatically different these silk proteins are so this is sort of the beauty of the diversification of the spider silk gene family.

Minor ampullate silk is used in web construction.