Narrator: Not all spider silks are created equal. This is Science Today. Biologists at the University of California, Riverside were the first to uncover the molecular structure of the gene for the protein that female spiders use to construct their egg case. This finding confirms the silk protein used for the egg case differs from dragline silks used to make webs. Biologist Cheryl Hayashi says their finding may lead to a variety of new, super-strong materials for industrial, medical and military uses.

Hayashi: I think the value of this egg case silk gene is not that maybe we want to replicate, we want to mimic just this silk gene - it's that in the context of all these other silk genes, now biomaterial scientists have the ability to sort of pick and choose and they can draw on this bank of information that's accumulating so they could tailor a material for a specific purpose.

Narrator: Hayashi says the next step is to fully characterize all the silk genes spun by four species of spiders that they are cloning the egg case silk gene from. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.