[Formation of natural silk and progress in artificial spinning]

Natural silks, produced by spiders and silkworms, are excellent materials with marvelous mechanical properties, biocompatibility and biodegradability, and widely used in the fields of textile, optics, electronics, biomedicine and environmental engineering. So far, there are many spinning methods to improve the mechanical properties of artificial fibers, such as wet spinning, dry spinning, and electrospinning. However, the performance of most artificial fibers is still inferior to natural silks. It is important to understand the correlations between hierarchical structures and performance in the field of artificial spinning. This review introduces the formation of natural silks, the relationship between the mechanical properties of silks and the hierarchical structure, the research progress in artificial spinning, and the application of silks.