Abstract
For hundreds of years, ships laden with porcelain, tea, and gold voyaged from China’s southern coast on a maritime leg of the historic Silk Road, the trade network connecting the East and the West from about 130 BCE to 1453 CE. Archaeologists have recovered many artifacts from shipwrecks along this route, yet no one has ever found remnants of the precious material that gave the network its name: silk. Until now. Using an ultrasensitive biosensor, researchers have detected the first traces of silk in samples taken from sediments within an exceptionally well-preserved shipwreck near a starting point of the Maritime Silk Road at the mouth of China’s Pearl River (ACS Sensors 2019, DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.9b01638). Silk degrades quickly in warm water, but molecules of the insoluble silk protein fibroin can remain in clay. Bing Wang of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Yang Zhou of the China National Silk Museum, and their colleagues developed
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