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灯台

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

Aim

To quantitatively describe the design principles of a life and to achieve full scratch-and-build.

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.

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