Some spiders have on their hindmost legs a comb for the manipulation of spider threats covered with nanofibers, which possess an anti-adhesive surface-structure. This could be of interest fort he processing of novel filter membranes (e.g. for face masks). The researchers of the Institutes of Applied Physics and of Biomedical Mechatronic at JKU (together with their European partners) want to learn from these spiders to make processing of nanofibers much more efficient (http://biocombs4nanofibers.eu/).

The first promising results on this have been recently published in ACS Applied Nanomaterials (ACS Appl. Nano Mater. 2020, 3, 3395−3401; https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsanm.0c00130, opens an external URL in a new window).

https://www.jku.at/news-events/events/detail/news/jku-corona-update-live-am-17-april-2020/, opens an external URL in a new window