Meeting Abstract
Spider silk is a diverse category of materials produced under different mechanical conditions. In orb-weaving spiders, up to six types of silk are produced by a combination of secretions from up to eight distinct silk glands. The “glandular affiliation hypothesis” indicates that discrete silk materials are produced and assembled in each gland. However, the time consuming nature of histology has largely limited the study of spider silk materials to external spigot and spinneret morphology on one hand, and silk proteomics and its genetic origins on the other. Information on internal gland morphology is necessary for understanding how fluid flow conditions combine with protein sequence variation and protein chemistry to produce different silk material properties. To date, only a few studies exist on the mechanical flow conditions responsible for protein assembly, and only one gland geometry from one spider species has been used to model fluid flow during spinning, the large major ampullate gland of Nephila edulis. Here we show that microCT can be used to rapidly isolate 3D silk gland geometries of multiple gland types. Such data enables the study of 3D comparative gland morphology across spider taxa. We propose the integration of comparative gland morphology into new studies of spider silk evolution. One exciting feature of the data is that it can also be exported for use in computational simulations of fluid flow and molecular assembly, potentially informing the development of bio-inspired material fabrication techniques as well as the study of fundamental biological questions.
