Dry-Spinning of Artificial Spider Silk Ribbons from Regenerated Natural Spidroin in an Organic Medium.

Natural spider silks with striking performances have achieved extensive investigations. Nonetheless, a lack of consensus over the mechanism of the natural spinning hinders the development of artificial spinning methods where the regenerated spider silks generally show poor performances compared with the natural fibers. As is known, the Plateau-Rayleigh instability tends to break solution column into droplets and has been considered as a main challenge during fiber-spinning. Here in this study, by harnessing the viscoelastic properties of the regenerated spidroin dope solution via organic salt-zinc acetate (ZA), we avoid this outcome and successfully realize dry-spinning of long and mechanically robust regenerated spider silk ribbons. The as obtained dry-spun spider silk ribbons show an enhanced modulus up to 14±4 GPa and a toughness of around 51±9 MJm -3 after the post-stretching treatment, which is even better than the pristine spider silk fibers. Our facile and flexible strategy enriches the spinning methodologies which bypasses the bottleneck of precisely mimicking the complex natural environment of the glands in spiders, shining a light to the spider-silk-based textile industrial applications. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.