| Spider silk is one of the strongest, most extensible and toughest biological materials known, exceeding the properties of many engineered materials including steel. Silks feature a hierarchical architecture where highly organized, densely H-bonded beta-sheet nanocrystals are arranged within a semi-amorphous protein matrix consisting of 31-helices and beta-turn protein structures. By using a bottom-up molecular-based mesoscale model that bridges the scales from Angstroms to hundreds of nanometers, here we show that the specific combination of a crystalline phase and a semi-amorphous matrix is crucial for the unique properties of silks. Specifically, our results reveal that the superior mechanical properties of spider silk can be explained solely by... |
