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Updated: Mar 9, 2026

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Synthetic Spider Silk Production on a Laboratory Scale
Published on: July 18, 2012
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Antibiotic Spider Silk: Site-Specific Functionalization of Recombinant Spider Silk Using "Click" Chemistry
David Harvey1, Philip Bardelang1, Sara L Goodacre2
1School of Chemistry, Centre for Biomolecular Sciences, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.
Advanced Materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.)
|December 29, 2016
Abstract:
In a new, versatile approach to fun-ction-alizing recombinant spider silk, L-azidohomoalanine is introduced residue-specifically in the minispidroin protein 4RepCT through expression in an E. coli methionine auxotroph. Both fluorophores and the antibiotic levofloxacin are attached to this bio-orthogonal amino acid using copper-catalyzed click chemistry, either before or after the silk fibers are self-assembled.

