How do you improve on one of nature’s most remarkable creations?
Medical technicians already spin spider silk, the strongest known natural fibre, to make mats and sponges as scaffolds on which to grow human cells. These structures would be even more useful if their stiffness could be adjusted. Cells grown on a scaffold as stiff as bone, for example, would more readily fuse with bone cells when reimplanted into the body.
Now a team of biomedical engineers from Tufts University in Boston, Nottingham Trent University in the UK and the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio,…
