Caddisfly Silk Gene Shows Surprising Diversity While Maintaining Adhesive Function

In the cold mountain streams of Utah, a small aquatic insect called the caddisfly has spent hundreds of millions of years solving a problem that still eludes human engineers: reliable adhesion underwater. Researchers at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University have now read the genetic record of that solution, discovering that a single species carries 24 distinct versions of its silk gene — a diversity far greater than anyone anticipated, yet one that preserves the silk's essential stickiness within carefully bounded limits. This paradox of constrained variation, written into the ge