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Exploitation of the remarkable properties of spider silk has been slow, due in part to the challenges involved in identifying and characterizing spider silk genes, but researchers have now made a major advance with the largest-ever study of spider silk genes.
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Bioscience News - GEG Tech top picks
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As they report today in an advance online paper in Nature Genetics, Penn scientists and their collaborators sequenced the full genome of the golden orb-weaver spider (Nephila clavipes), a prolific silk-spinner that turns out to produce 28 varieties of silk proteins. In addition to cataloguing new spider silk genes, the researchers discovered novel patterns within the genes that may help to explain the unique properties of different types of silk.