PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - William Finnigan
AU  - Aled D. Roberts
AU  - Nigel S. Scrutton
AU  - Rainer Breitling
AU  - Jonny J. Blaker
AU  - Eriko Takano
TI  - The effect of terminal globular domains on the response of recombinant mini-spidroins to fiber spinning triggers
AID  - 10.1101/2020.02.13.940478
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.02.13.940478
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/13/2020.02.13.940478.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/13/2020.02.13.940478.full
AB  - Spider silk spidroins consist of long repetitive protein strands, flanked by globular terminal domains. The globular domains are often omitted in recombinant spidroins, but are thought to be essential for the spiders’ natural spinning process. Mimicking this spinning process could be an essential step towards producing strong synthetic spider silk. Here we describe the production of a range of mini-spidroins with both terminal domains, and characterize their response to a number of biomimetic spinning triggers. Our results suggest that the inclusion of the terminal domains is needed to match the response to shear that native spidroins exhibit. Our results also suggest that a pH drop alone is insufficient to trigger assembly in a wet-spinning process, and must be combined with salting-out for effective fiber formation. With these insights, we applied these assembly triggers for relatively biomimetic wet spinning. This work adds to the foundation of literature for developing improved biomimetic spinning techniques, which ought to result in synthetic silk that more closely approximates the unique properties of native spider silk.