Spider dragline (major ampullate) silk outperforms virtually all other natural and manmade materials in terms of tensile strength and toughness. For this reason, the mass-production of artificial spider silks through transgenic technologies has been a major goal of biomimetics research. Although all known arthropod silk proteins are extremely large (>200 kiloDaltons), recombinant spider silks h...

Spider bites are a worldwide problem. Brown recluse spider bites can lead to severe local or systemic clinical effects, such as edema, necrotic ulcer, rashes, fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, malaise, arthralgia, myalgia, hemolysis, leukocytosis, disseminated intravascular coagulation, renal failure, and death. Eyelid bites from brown recluse spiders are rare. We report a child with severe faci...

Spiders in the superfamily Araneoidea produce viscous glue from aggregate silk glands. Aggregate glue coats prey-capture threads and hampers the escape of prey from webs, thereby increasing the foraging success of spiders. cDNAs for Aggregate Spider Glue 1 (ASG1) and 2 (ASG2) have been previously described from the golden orb-weaver, Nephila clavipes, and Western black widow, Latrodectus hesper...

We present the material analysis of scaffolding silk from the cobweb of the black widow spider Latrodectus hesperus. 30 strands were tested from the webs of nine spiders. Strands were stretched at 0.211 mm/s as force and extension were recorded. Cross-sectional area was measured under 1000 x oil-immersion light microscopy. The stress strain curve shows that cobweb silk is a distinct material fr...

A modification of the classical procedure of fluctuation analysis is used to measure the waveform, w(t), mean amplitude, (h), and mean rate of occurrence, (r), of miniature endplate potentials (MEPPs) at frog cutaneous pectoris neuromuscular junctions treated with black widow spider venom (BWSV) . MEPP parameters are determined from the power spectrum of the fluctuating potential and the second...