Prespun silk

Nevertheless, despite our rapidly increasing knowledge about silk protein sequences, very little is known about the part played by gene design (Tatham and Shewry, 2000) in the stability and solubility of the prespun silk and in the final property of silk fibers across a wider variety of spiders and insects. 

Several studies (Asakura etal, 2001 Dicko etal, 2005 Heslot, 1998 Lazo and Downing, 1999 Valluzzi et al, 2002) have focused their effort toward the understanding of silk stability and to describing the secondary structure population present in the prespun silk. One can, however, hypothesize that the formation of the gel state involves the competition between... 

Silk I, the prespun pseudocrystalline form of silk present in the gland in a water-soluble state, remains without a consensus structure in the field and likely represented by many partially stable states. Many models have been proposed and likely reflect many local minima... 

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