Isolation and Analysis of Black Widow Spider cDNA Sequence

Spider silk contains many qualities because of its high tensile strength to weight ratio and its elasticity that make it an advantageous for applications of civil engineering military , personal defense and medical fields. For instance spider silk could be incorporated into cables, bulletproof vests and suture material to make them more effective. The main problem is that efficient techniques for harvesting commercial quantities of this substance have yet to be discovered. Our research centered around picking pieces out of the black widow spider genome and preparing them for sequencing by performing single clone excisions, amplification in E.Coli and minipreps; in hopes that these genes can be one day incorporated into bacteria so they can be amplified into commercial quantities. Once sequenced we will compare them to known genes in other spiders and see if we have any homologues, doing this helps further our understanding of the black widow spider silk glands as any homologues found are entered into a scientific database. Our results will be discussed after the DNA sequencing reactions are analyzed and conclusions will be drawn upon using bioinformatic approaches