Harnessing Spider Powers

Since Ancient Greece, cultures have treated wounds by rubbing them with spider webs, believing this prevented blood loss and infection.  Since then, the practice has been lost.  Until recently.  Professor Fritz Vollrath has started using the silk of spiders and silkworms for medical use.  Vollrath put this tradition to the test by creating spider silk dressings in a series of animal trials, and found they blended seamlessly within host tissue. "Spider silk is inherently biocompatible so the wound does not reject it," he says. The silk is also biodegradable, meaning the dressing is simply eaten away as the wound heals."  He uses goldenrod spiders kept on the roof of Oxford university.  

However, in order to harness these ‘‘powers,” we have to understand how it works.  Volrath has discovered an array of proteins in the silk, which proved resilient to stress and deformation.  This, he concluded, was the reason that the silk is so tough.  In addition to that, he discovered that the spiders produce seven types of silk.  Dragline silk, which the spider uses to hang from, proved the toughest.

I chose this article because with so many advancements in the world, it’s amazing that possibly the most useful has been in front of us the the whole time.  

For more information on this amazing discovery, go to http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/24/health/healing-powers-of-a-spiders-web/