Application of thin-layer chromatography to ecotoxicological study with the Steatoda grossa spider web

Abstract

In the search for biocompatible and biodegradable natural products, much attention of biomedical engineering experts is attracted by spider web (also known as spider silk). Apart from its biocompatibility and biodegradability, the key feature of spider silk is its extraordinary tensile strength, in many cases surpassing that of steel or Kevlar. Although spider silk (unlike that produced by the silk worms) cannot be produced on a mass scale, it can serve as a structural template to be imitated by the organic chemists. The main building blocks of the spider silk proteins, spidroins, are the non-polar and hydrophobic α-amino acids, and the most abundant among them are l-glycine and l-alanine. In this study, we investigated an impact of cadmium chloride (CdCl2) as a toxic anthropogenic environmental pollutant on quantitative levels of glycine, alanine, histidine, and phenylalanine in spider silk produced by the female Steatoda grossa spider kept for the periods of 4 weeks and 12 months, respectively, on cadmi...