KONO Lab
Bioinformatics, Systems biology, Synthetic biology
Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University
Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University

Design Biology
Bioinformatics
Systems biology
Synthetic biology
Molecular biology
Microbiology
Genomics
Molecular ecology
Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University
403-1, Daihouji, Tsuruoka, Yamagata, 997-0017, Japan
Phone: +81-235-29-0571
Email: ciconia [at] sfc.keio.ac.jp
Latest Publication
Arakawa and Kono et al., 2022
1000 spider silkomes: Linking sequences to silk physical properties
Science Advances, 8(41):eabo6043
Spider silks are among the toughest known materials and thus provide models for renewable, biodegradable, and sustainable biopolymers. However, the entirety of their diversity still remains elusive, and silks that exceed the performance limits of industrial fibers are constantly being found. We obtained transcriptome assemblies from 1098 species of spiders to comprehensively catalog silk gene sequences and measured the mechanical, thermal, structural, and hydration properties of the dragline silks of 446 species. The combination of these silk protein genotype-phenotype data revealed essential contributions of multicomponent structures with major ampullate spidroin 1 to 3 paralogs in high-performance dragline silks and numerous amino acid motifs contributing to each of the measured properties. We hope that our global sampling, comprehensive testing, integrated analysis, and open data will provide a solid starting point for future biomaterial designs.