Recent developments in artificial spider silk and functional gel fibers

It is highly desirable to develop fiber materials with high strength and toughness while increasing fiber strength always results in a decrease in toughness. Spider silk is a natural fiber material with an excellent combination of high strength and toughness, which is produced from the spinning dope solution by gelation and drawing spinning process. This encourages people to prepare artificial fibers by mimicking the material, structure, and spinning of natural spider silk. In this review, we first summarized the preparation of artificial spider silk prepared via such a gelation process from different types of materials, including nonrecombinant proteins, recombinant proteins, polypeptides, synthetic polymers, and polymer nanocomposites. In addition, different spinning approaches for spinning artificial spider silk are also summarized. In the third section, some novel application scenarios of the artificial spider silk were summarized, such as artificial muscles, sensing, and smart fibers.