Can you actually swing from spider silk? | Veritasium

The Gist

Spider silk cannot support a human swing because it is too thin, but its strength relies on an ingenious arrangement of nanocrystals and amorphous regions within its proteins. While researchers can genetically engineer silkworms to produce hybrid spider silk, the fibers never quite match the raw toughness and performance of natural spider silk.

Quick Overview

Spider silk is famous for being stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar, prompting a long-running quest to swing from it like Spider-Man and recreate it industrially. Through material testing with Professor Todd Blackledge and commercial production at Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, the video reveals that while transgenic silkworms can produce hybrid silk reaching up to sixty percent of natural spider silk strength, true replication remains elusive. Ultimately, the unique combination of nanocrystal sheets and stretchy amorphous domains gives natural spider silk its unmatched toughness, though human swinging tests inevitably end in ripped skin and broken fibers.

Key Points: Professor Todd Blackledge and his team at the University of Akron study spider silk diversity and structural mechanics in biology research labs. Major ampullate dragline silk provides the structural strength of a spider web and measures about six hundred megapascals in tensile strength. Darwin's bark spiders spin giant webs spanning up to twenty-five meters across open water in Madagascar, producing silk with an ultimate tensile strength of sixteen hundred megapascals. Spider silk achieves its incredible toughness through a combination of rigid nanocrystals and stretchy amorphous regions made of proteins called spidroins. François Xavier Bon first collected spider egg sacs in 1709 to boil, comb, and spin into silk stockings for the French royal court, though gathering enough spiders proved nearly impossible. Kraig Biocraft Laboratories in Michigan uses microinjection stations to insert spider silk genes into silkworm embryos, creating transgenic silkworms that produce hybrid silk fibers. Modern transgenic spider silk fibers achieve roughly sixty percent of the strength of natural spider silk, while companies continue exploring CRISPR-Cas9 for more targeted gene insertions.