Graphene sprayed on spider silk produces a material that is strong enough to catch an airplane falling from the sky, according to researchers.

Researchers combined particles of grapheme, spraying the liquid on to spiders. The spiders then began to spin silk covered with the revolutionary carbon material. The modified silk was found to be 3.5 times as strong as that produced by the giant riverine orb spider, which spins the strongest spider silk in the world, writes Tech Times.

Researchers are unsure how the graphene became embedded in the spider silk. The arachnids may coat the threads with the carbon material in an effort to clean themselves off after they are sprayed, researchers suggest. Another possibility is that the arachnids somehow incorporate the man-made substance into their natural silk, vastly increasing the strength of the material.

"Spiders could spin graphene and nanotubes in the silk also as an efficient way of eliminating them from their organism ... This new reinforcing procedure could also be applied to other animals and plants, leading to a new class of bionic materials for ultimate applications," the researchers from the University of Trento, Italy, told New Scientist.

The new super-strong form of spider silk could be used in future fabrics as well as in the development of new bionic materials, to mesh artificial and biological substances.

Graphene, which was first developed in 2004, is a form of carbon consisting of planar sheets which are one atom thick, with the atoms arranged in a honeycomb-shaped lattice. A pile of 75 million of the sheets lying on top of each other would be just one inch thick. The substance possesses remarkable strength and electrical properties that could result in a number of applications in both science and electronics.

Despite the exciting new discovery, there are several challenges facing developers to find new uses for the graphene-modified spider silk. For one, four of the 15 arachnids in the study died after being sprayed with the artificial material. Other spiders lived through the application of graphene to their bodies, but the silk spun by these spiders was lower-quality than that spun prior to the application of graphene. These results suggest that the technique is still far from being practiced on an industrial level.

The results of the study of graphene-modified spider silk were published in a scientific article by the authors.