Cloning and Structure of Different Types of Spider Silk

Based on both physical and chemical properties it is clear that spider silks are very different than silk worm silk. In particular, the amino acid composition of the various spider silks are different with the variations being in Glx and Pro which are much higher than in worm silk. Studies by others using X-ray diffraction and by us with FTIR demonstrate that the dragline silk is predominantly Beta sheet. In the past contract period we constructed a cDNA library in a plasmid vector from the silk glands dragline of one species of spider. We isolated several clones which are positive in hybridizing to our DNA probes based on the protein sequence. We sequenced two clones which encoded different proteins both of which are components of major ampullate silk. We have obtained clones which appear to encode proteins for other spider silks as well.