University of Trento feeds Pholcidae spiders with Carbon nanotubes and graphene

It appears that there are mutant Spiders out there in the wild, thanks to the crazy scientists at the University of Trento in Trento!

For some strange reason, a team of scientists at the University of Trento in Trento, Italy led by

Dr. Emiliano Lepore sprayed fifteen (15) Pholcidae Spiders with water infused with carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes as reported in the article “Mutant super-Spiders weave webs stronger than bulletproof material”, published May 9, 2015 by Danny Gallagher, CNET News.

Result was not that one of the scientists got bitten and transformed into Spiderman. Rather, more impressively, fifteen (15) Pholcidae Spiders began producing Spider Silk that contained the Carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes, making them super strong as reported in the article “Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon”, published May 6, 2015, MIT Technology Review.

Scientists spray Spiders with Carbon nanotube water – Spiders web not made from the food they eat

What hypothesis did the scientists use to make the decision to spray the Spiders with water infused with carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes?

Possibly they assumed that the Pholcidae Spider’s Silk was not made from the food it ate, but from other material it gathered from its environment, seeing as the Spiders spinnerets that produces the Spider Silk is different from is excretory system.

Also they mainly eat the blood of the creatures that fall into their web, suggesting that whatever material made up their Spider Silk, possibly did not come from the blood and other bodily fluids absorbed from their victims.

The scientists at the University of Trento then compared the strength of these Spider Silk strands to the reference by placing the Spider Silk into a device that could measure the Young’s modulus as well as the toughness modulus of these materials.

The device fixed the Spider Silk between two (2) C-shaped cardboard holders in a machine that could measure the load on the fiber as small as 15 nano-newtons and axial and bending displacement with a resolution of 0.1 nanometers.

Based on the readings from the machines, the results point to a fiber stronger than any known organic material known to man, to quote Dr. Emiliano Lepore: “We measure a fracture strength up to 5.4 GPa, a Young’s modulus up to 47.8 GPa and a toughness modulus up to 2.1 GPa. This is the highest toughness modulus for a fibre, surpassing synthetic polymeric high performance fibres (e.g. Kelvar49) and even the current toughest knotted fibers”.

In fact, the Spider Silk in their webs is so strong, it's strong than the strongest know manmade organic fiber, Kevlar, which is used in the making of Bullet proof vests. The scientists made sure to have the Spiders initially spin webs made of regular Spider Silk to be used as reference.

University of Trento  feeds Pholcidae Spiders with Carbon nanotubes and graphene – Spiderman strong Silk is the result  

So how did the Spiders incorporate the carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes into their Spider Silk?

No one is sure, as this previous methods have simply involved coating the Spider Silk with a vapour of any material that researchers wanted to add to the Spider Silk. This is technically the first time that anyone has attempted to feed the Spiders a material and they incorporated into their Spider Silk, suggesting a mechanism by which Spider Silk can be improved.

It's already possible to make Spider Silk from Transgenic Silkworms based on the work of USTAR Professor Randy Lewis in collaboration with Dr. Malcolm Fraser from the University of Notre Dame.

Synthetic  Spider Silk was also produced from Transgenic Escherichia Coli Bacteria based on the work of Dr. My Hedhammar of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Director of R&D at Spiber Technologies in Uppsala as reported in my blog article entitled “USTAR produces Spider Silk From Transgenic Silkworms and Japanese Spiber from Transgenic Escherichia Coli Bacteria - Spider Silk's big trend in Fabrics which means I’m Out Ciara and Nikki Minaj Style”.

But harvesting Spider Silk directly from Spiders isn't currently possible, despite previous attempts., making this discovery not only significant, even groundbreaking, but so elegantly simple as to make me wonder why scientists are just discovering this.

Perhaps previous scientists thought that the Spider’s selective taste for blood mean that they would have not ingested the water choc full of non-nutritious carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes. Also even if they’d ingested, perhaps previous scientists thought they’d simply excrete it as a waste product, unused in their production of Silk.

Perhaps much in the same way carbon nanotubes and graphene flake can be incorporated into Spider Silk by feeding it to Spiders in their food, could it also be possible to make stronger synthetic Spider Silk by also including in other nutrient solution of the above mentioned transgenic organisms?

That's the next experiment I'd like to see done!