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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2022 Oct 12.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Rev Chem. 2021 Oct 5;5(11):753–772. doi: 10.1038/s41570-021-00325-x

Fig. 3 ∣. Synthetic spider silk mimics recapitulate the primary or secondary structure of spider silk proteins.

Fig. 3 ∣

a ∣ The secondary structure of spider silks exemplifies how nano-sized crystalline β-sheets and hydrogen bonds in an amorphous matrix can endow a material with outstanding mechanical properties69. b ∣ Spider silk-mimicking multiblock copolymers with amino acid derivatives can be prepared by ring-opening polymerization, chemo-enzymatic polymerization with subsequent chain extension or step-growth polymerization77-79. c ∣ An Ashby plot of tensile stress versus strain for natural spider silks and synthetic mimics.