full transcript
From the Ted Talk by Cheryl Hayashi: The magnificence of spider silk
Unscramble the Blue Letters
But what, exactly, is spider silk? Spider silk is almost entirely protein. Nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a slgine gene family, so this means that the dvrsitiey of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family, so presumably the oinrgial sepidr ancestor made one kind of silk, and over the last 380 million years, that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged, specialized, over and over and over again, to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today. There are several features that all these skils have in cmomon. They all have a common dgesin, such as they're all very long — they're sort of outlandishly long compared to other proteins. They're very repetitive, and they're very rich in the amino acids glycine and annliae. To give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like, this is a dragline silk piteron, it's just a portion of it, from the black wodiw spider. This is the kind of sequence that I love looking at day and night. (Laughter)
Open Cloze
But what, exactly, is spider silk? Spider silk is almost entirely protein. Nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a ______ gene family, so this means that the _________ of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family, so presumably the ________ ______ ancestor made one kind of silk, and over the last 380 million years, that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged, specialized, over and over and over again, to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today. There are several features that all these _____ have in ______. They all have a common ______, such as they're all very long — they're sort of outlandishly long compared to other proteins. They're very repetitive, and they're very rich in the amino acids glycine and _______. To give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like, this is a dragline silk _______, it's just a portion of it, from the black _____ spider. This is the kind of sequence that I love looking at day and night. (Laughter)
Solution
- silks
- spider
- design
- widow
- protein
- common
- diversity
- alanine
- single
- original
Original Text
But what, exactly, is spider silk? Spider silk is almost entirely protein. Nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a single gene family, so this means that the diversity of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family, so presumably the original spider ancestor made one kind of silk, and over the last 380 million years, that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged, specialized, over and over and over again, to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today. There are several features that all these silks have in common. They all have a common design, such as they're all very long — they're sort of outlandishly long compared to other proteins. They're very repetitive, and they're very rich in the amino acids glycine and alanine. To give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like, this is a dragline silk protein, it's just a portion of it, from the black widow spider. This is the kind of sequence that I love looking at day and night. (Laughter)
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
collocation |
frequency |
spider silk |
11 |
spider silks |
5 |
silk fibers |
4 |
capture spiral |
4 |
silk proteins |
4 |
million years |
3 |
silk glands |
3 |
dragline silk |
3 |
repeat unit |
3 |
individual spider |
2 |
spend long |
2 |
long days |
2 |
individual silk |
2 |
silk gland |
2 |
tubuliform silk |
2 |
ampullate silk |
2 |
major ampullate |
2 |
silk gene |
2 |
flying prey |
2 |
toughest dragline |
2 |
toughness values |
2 |
studying spider |
2 |
ngrams of length 3
collocation |
frequency |
spend long days |
2 |
Important Words
- acids
- alanine
- amino
- ancestor
- black
- common
- compared
- day
- design
- diverged
- diversity
- dragline
- duplicated
- encoded
- explained
- family
- features
- flavors
- gene
- give
- glycine
- idea
- kind
- large
- laughter
- long
- love
- means
- million
- night
- original
- outlandishly
- portion
- protein
- proteins
- repetitive
- rich
- sequence
- silk
- silks
- single
- sort
- specialized
- spider
- today
- types
- variety
- widow
- years