An Engineered Recombinant Spider Silk Protein Providing Disulfide‐Locked Control over Self‐Assembly and Fiber Formation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Spider silks are renowned for their mechanical properties. The notably tough Argiope trifasciata aciniform silk is spun from a protein predominantly comprising a series of identical 200 residue units (“W units”). In solution, each W unit has a globular 5‐helix domain connected to its neighbors by intrinsically disordered linkers while the fiber contains mixed α‐helical, β‐sheet and disordered structuring. Helix 5 is more dynamic and prone to denaturation than the remainder of the globular domain, implying that it may structurally transform during fiber spinning. Rational cysteine substitutions are introduced at a proximal pair of serines in helix 5 and in helix 1 of the globular domain. Upon disulfide formation, the helix 5 C‐terminal region loses helicity and experiences increased backbone dynamics, while the remainder of the globular structure is effectively unperturbed. Fiber formation by hand‐drawing and wet‐spinning is prevented in the disulfide‐locked state, but readily possible in the reduced (“unlocked”) state. The disulfide‐locked state differs from the unlocked state with much more heterogeneous pre‐fibrillar assembly in spinning dope and through prevention of β‐sheet formation upon cooling following thermal denaturation. This engineered protein thus provides a chemically‐reversible disulfide‐locked state of aciniform silk with modified self‐assembly propensity and fiber formation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".