Author(s)

F. Teulé, C. Aubé, M. Ellison & A. Abbott

Abstract

Engineering any fiber protein requires understanding of their structure function relationships. We have chosen natural protein fibers such as spider silk and collagen as models to investigate the role that various proteins primary structural components play in fiber production. Spider dragline silk is essentially composed of two highly repetitive proteins called spidroins (1 and 2) that are made of alternating amorphous glycine-rich amino acid repeats and crystalline alaninerich motifs. We have focused our research on testing the role of alanine motifs found in these silk proteins in the mechanical properties of the resulting fiber. Three synthetic spidroin 1-like genes were engineered to determine the role of such alanine-rich motifs in spidroin 1 proteins. Each of these cons

Keywords