NSF Award
2423117
Spider silks display unrivaled material complexity, with individual animals producing multiple high-performance fibers exhibiting an impressive range of strength, extensibility, and adhesion. Unravelling the molecular composition of spider silks within and across species has importance for understanding how this spectrum of desirable properties evolved, and for engineering applications aimed at mimicking these properties. This project will provide a mentored training program to a mid-career Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell that will complement her existing background in silk protein evolution with new training in silk protein production and biomaterial characterization. The training will take place at Tufts University, in the lab of a collaborative partner at the leading edge of silk protein biotechnology. The protected research time made possible with this award will propel the Principal Investigator’s career in a new trajectory for sustained professional advancement. In addition to learning novel methods in bioengineering and material sciences, the award will be used to develop and analyze a spider silk protein database. The database will be used to identify promising new leads for biomaterial development. Broader impacts made possible by this award include the development of a new undergraduate course in Silk Biology, integrating animal biology, human culture, and engineering. With the Principal Investigator training in a new discipline, the project will also enhance student research opportunities at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The resulting silk protein database and publication will be an important resource for biological engineers looking for novel recipes to produce silk-based materials with enhanced properties. <br/><br/>Spider silks are primarily composed of different members of a protein family, the diversification of which explains the divergent material properties of each silk type. As they are protein-based, extensive efforts have focused on producing artificial spider silks mimicking their desirable properties using genetic engineering. However, only a few silk proteins from a handful of species have been intensively studied to understand their structure-function relationship. At the same time, the growth of genomics is revealing an unexpected diversity of spider silk proteins, but the functional contributions of these diverse proteins to silk mechanics is largely unknown. This project will integrate advances in evolutionary genomics and protein engineering to address these gaps through two goals. First, the Principal Investigator will engage in mentored training in the lab of a collaborative partner enabling her to characterize the functional role of specific silk proteins in fiber mechanics. The protein expression work will focus on highly similar silk proteins that have independently evolved in distantly related species to test whether similarity at the sequence level translates into mechanical similarity at the fiber level. Work of the project will also be aimed at assembling and analyzing a spider silk protein database to identify additional candidates for further functional investigation, and to provide a public resource that will build interdisciplinary links between the fields of evolutionary genomics and biomaterial engineering.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
