9 Who is Cheryl Hayashi?
jbnus and cmkirila
Speaker Overview:
Cheryl Hayashi is a curator, director, and research biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research is exclusively focused on spider silk and the molecules that make up silk. She has been involved in over 100 publications over the past 20 years and won the MacArthur Fellowship Program in 2007. This TED talk was given in February 2020, when Hayashi was a research professor at the University of California Riverside.
Overview:
Immense amount of spiders when compared to number of primates, each type of spider makes silk. Both spiders and spider silk have been around for millions of years. Lots of different spider silks, spiders can make up to 7 different types of silk. Multiple spinnerets on the “business end” of the spider. There are dramatically different spider silk genes depending on the type of silk. With these different silks, there are different amounts of stress and strain that each silk can take. The flagelliform silk is very good with strain but the major ampullate has very good stress properties. Orb web weaving spiders have a higher silk toughness when compared to other spiders. Much higher toughness over carbon fiber, kevlar, and nylon fiber.
Spider silk is a protein-based filament. Four amino acids are the primary building blocks of spider silk. Hayashi states: “These [proteins] are: (1) polyalanine (An), (2) alternating glycine and alanine couplets (GA)n, (3) triplets composed of two glycines followed by a variable amino acid (GGX)n, and (4) glycine-prolineglycine containing units (GPGXn).” [1]
