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Updated: Jun 29, 2026

Microfluidic Dry-spinning and Characterization of Regenerated Silk Fibroin Fibers
Published on: September 4, 2017
Diffraction from the beta-sheet crystallites in spider silk
S Ulrich1, A Glišović, T Salditt
1Institut für Theoretische Physik, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany. ulrich@theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de
Abstract:
We analyze the wide-angle X-ray scattering from oriented spider silk fibers in terms of a quantitative scattering model, including both structural and statistical parameters of the beta-sheet crystallites of spider silk in the amorphous matrix. The model is based on kinematic scattering theory and allows for rather general correlations of the positional and orientational degrees of freedom, including the crystallite's size, composition and dimension of the unit cell. The model is evaluated numerically and compared to experimental scattering intensities allowing us to extract the geometric and statistical parameters. We show explicitly that for the experimentally found mosaicity (width of the orientational distribution) intercrystallite effects are negligible and the data can be analyzed in terms of single-crystallite scattering, as is usually assumed in the literature.
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