Sara L. Goodacre is a research geneticist and Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Genetics at the University of Nottingham.[1][2] She is the lead for the Open Air Laboratories,[3][Link to precise page] a citizen science project that engages people with the outdoor environment and Deputy Director of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Doctoral Training Programme.[4]
Goodacre joined the University of Oxford[7] as a research fellow in 1999.[5] She was a research fellow at the University of East Anglia from 2002. She was described by the BBC as Spider Woman.[8] As of 2018[update], Goodacre is based at the University of Nottingham, where she founded the SpiderLab in 2007 and leads the ArachNotts research group.[1][9] As a geneticist, Goodacre studies the evolution, population and conservation of spiders.[2] She monitored the mating behaviour and sex ratio of the linyphiid spider Pityohyphantes phrygianus with Bengt Gunnarsson at the University of Gothenburg.[1][10] She also studied the silk of Mygalomorphae spiders and the genetic diversity of spider silk genes[11][1] and found evidence for antimicrobial activity in the silk of common house spiders.[12] She found that Erigone atra, a pest controlling spider, uses long-distance airborne dispersal.[13] Goodacre contributed to the 2011 book Spider Physiology and Behaviour: Physiology.[14] In 2015 Goodacre reported that spiders could survive "sailing" across oceans.[15]
ArachNotts study the diving bell spider and its silk, which it uses to build a diving bell in which it stores air underwater, and have so far identified some of the silk genes used by this spider.[16][11] They also work on the relationship between spiders and the microbes that they carry with them, including the mating behaviour and sex-ratio of offspring, the ecology and biological control potential of spiders in agriculture and the use of genetic tools in the conservation of the endangered raft spider.[16]
Goodacre worked alongside chemists at the University of Nottingham to create functionalised spider silk that could be used for drug delivery, wound healing and regenerative medicine.[17][18][19][20] This involved attaching fluorescent dyes and antibiotics by click chemistry to silk synthesised by Escherichia coli.[17][21][22] The intention is this synthetic silk can slowly deliver antibiotics or be used as a scaffold to grow new tissues.[23] She has patented the synthesised silk (functionalised spidroin).[24]
