Unique Silk Fibers from Weaver Ants

Abstract

Weaver ants (Fig. 39.1) belonging to the Oecophylla smaragdina family produce natural silks in the form of nanofibers that are connected together to form webs that resemble a piece of fabric as seen in Fig. 39.2. Fibers in the webs were hollow and had average diameters of 450 nm and had a unique architecture. As seen in Fig. 39.3, ants stick the fibers to form a web, and the connecting places were considerably stronger and resist alkali treatment even at boiling temperature. Although properties of individual fibers produced by the ant were not tested, webs produced by the ants were considerably stronger than electrospun protein nanofiber webs with substantially higher elongation (32 %) as seen in Table 39.1. It would be considerably challenging to produce nanofiber webs, especially with hollow nanofibers in the laboratory. Since ants are social insects unlike spiders, it would be possible to produce unique nanofibers webs by rearing the ants. It was found that the webs could be used as substrates for tissue engineering and could also load high amounts of drugs due to the presence of hollow fibers [11Red]. Other researchers have also reported that fibers in the weaver ant webs have diameters between 266 nm and 3 μm and that the proteins are mostly in the form of random coils and β-sheets [10Sir].