One of the elements that typically gives Halloween its ghoulish decoration is the webs that spiders spin. You can see the fake stuff all over bushes in October (even though they’re a pain to clean up). The real webbing is one of nature’s wonders, insanely strong, and the reason for the web-spinning spiders’ success.
Fittingly, on Halloween, the New Scientist published an article on the sticky substance that makes the whole thing work. “The glue, which the spider secretes onto the central prey-capturing spiral threads of its web, is known to be based on a complex sugary polymer called a glycoprotein. But no one knew how this supersticky molecule did its job, or which genes coded for it.”
It seems that, now, we know — or at least, we have the beginnings of it. The article continues, “They discovered that the sticky glycoprotein is formed from two separate proteins, each 110 amino acids long, that seem to be encoded by genes on opposite strands of the very same sequence of DNA.”
Cracking the mystery could have big results in many fields. Glues, sutures and all sorts of other things could be greatly improved by it.
