Sara Goodacre

The 'SpiderLab' at Nottingham studies the diversity of spiders and of their silks, in order to understand what factors drive and explain the current distribution of diversity seen today. Insights from these studies allow us to understand how we might best maximise the pest-controlling potential of spiders in a farmers field, and how we might copy particular genetic templates for spider silk to make our own, synthetic versions that give materials with new possibilities for use in medicine or engineering.