Can anyone tell me the best volatile liquid in which the spider's silk can be soluble?
Please try long chain solvents, pentane, hexane, heptane etc, or, methelene chloride, diethyl ether, toluene, xylene
I think mostly it may be soluble to butanol or may dissolve in concentrated glacial acetic acid
Dissolving a fiber of few hundread kDa proteins sounds a challenge. Volatile solvents may remove pyrrolidone and other organic small molecules, and then water may remove salts. But I would be surprised if you can solve it unless you use strong acids to hydrolize peptide bonds.
Tried in ethanol, Tri Fluro Ethanol and Formic Acid. Silk is not soluble in all the three. I saw in an article that it is not soluble in water, ethanol, weak acids and base. So it will not be soluble in butanol and glacial acetic acid too. Didn't try in HFIP and Guanidinum thiocyanate coz they are much costlier. Few other article says that it can be soluble in Calcium Nitrate, Sulphuric Acid, Formic Acid, HFIP and Li Br but Li Br and Calcium Nitrate are salts and they should be soluble in water, bu silk has super contraction property when it is mixed with water. The remaining two are highly concentrated acids and when used for electro spinning, it may create spark in the apparatus and it is much more dangerous in case of sulphuric acid.
Ram, i was done research in keratin feather. Polypeptide structure of keratin is resemble to spider silk.They are rich in cystine that have disulfide bonds. Keratin has alpha structure but spider silk has beta. So, it is difficult to hydrolyze them by alcohol or strong organic solvent.
Ok move on with many solvents as you can and try to dissolve spiders silk as soon as you can . Thats research gud luck to every body who tries it to solve
Keratinase didn't dissolve spider silk. You can try some treatments, combine physical and chemical treatment with strong base or acid.
I think sodium and potassium chloride and alkaline iodide can have the ability to dissolve spiders silk . Just try
Scientifically it is not soluble just like cheratine or cellulose. Nevertheless, it is mainly protein, so think about the forces that can keep huge protein molecules together. Disulfide bonds can be broken by 2-mercapro ethanol, and van der Wals bonds between apolar chains can be broken by detergents like SDS. So in the unlikely case that there is a way to solve spider silk without braking covalent bonds in the backbones of the protein chains, then it is the good old method that is used to dissolve all kind of proteins, and it is called SDS-PAGE sample buffer. Try and put it in 2% SDS 2 mM 2-ME for 15 min in 98 decree or boiling water bath. Nevertheless if you do not cate about whole molecules, but want to study amino acid composition or similar only, then 6M HCl will hydrolize the peptid bonds in a few hours at also high temperature, and make small fragments or free amino acids for you to dissolve easily.
It seems that I freely replace T and R letters with each other. Sorry for that. Also decree wanted to mean degree (centigrade)
Sorry for a delayed reply after a long time... I tried HFIP too!! It didn't get dissolved in it.... Also heated silk and then tried dissolving it in chloroform... The result for that too negative.... Tried Conc. Sulphuric acid.. the silk looked like dissolved but it actually got burnt in it.. I heard there is some technique to solidify strong acids... it is similar to mechanical casting technique... Got completely confused...
I think strong acids like nitric and sulphuric acid can displve spiders silk just in few seconds , but handle it with care
No need to spin as it totally dissolves and liquifies the threads of strings , so that you can see only liquid content as the acids react on it . So after the acids evaporate u can view the the remains or residues of the spiders silk contents . Try it .
Madam it won't be in an array fashion and cannot be formed to required length and shape.. And if the task is just to dissolve, we can do it in salts too.. The purpose of spinning is to get a silk fibre for testing its tensile property.. And in addition the acid when reacted will remove all the tensile property of the silk..
Sorry sir ,i am not aware of the correct situation of dissolvement .i think a entomologist can give u a correct answer .any way try for solution . Gud luck .
Finally i have read few articles and simplified the question to smaller level... I want to know on which volatile solvents glycine and amino acids will dissolve... and theoretically is there any equations and calculations available to find the reaction taking place between the acid and the liquid and whether it can be dissolved or not!! please help me with few articles, suggestions and links please..
Simple try out : Natural silk dissolves in Caustic soda at 10%, boiling point 15 min.
http://www.polisilk.com/text.html
I'm currently working a project that involves dissolving black widow silk, and similar to what Krzysztof Bielikowicz said, we are currently using a combination of 8M guanidine HCl, which is similar to GITC in addition to 6M Urea, 0.5M DTT in a 7.8ph Tris buffer. I'm not an expert, only an assistant, and it should be noted that these only seem to denature the silk (details still in the woodworks) and not fully dissolve it. I believe the urea acts as an agent in dissolving the matter of the tubularform silk into aciniform silk and the DTT breaks the disulphide bonds in the aminoacid sequence of the silk, but to completely solvate it im not sure.
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