Regulation of Silk Material Structure by Temperature-Controlled Water Vapor Annealing

By Xiao Hu, Karen Shmelev, Lin Sun, E. Gil, Sang-Hyug Park, P. Cebe, David Kaplan. Biomacromolecules, 2011

604 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a simple and effective method to obtain refined control of the molecular structure of silk biomaterials through physical temperature-controlled water vapor annealing (TCWVA). The silk materials can be prepared with control of crystallinity, from a low content using conditions at 4°C (alpha-helix dominated silk I structure), to highest content of ~60% crystallinity at 100°C (beta-sheet dominated silk II structure). This new physical approach covers the range of structures previously reported to govern crystallization during the fabrication of silk materials, yet offers a simpler, green chemistry, approach with tight control of reproducibility. The transition kinetics, thermal, mechanical, and biodegradation properties of the silk films prepared at different temperatures were investigated and compared by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), uniaxial tensile studies, and enzymatic degradation studies. The results revealed that this new physical processing method accurately controls structure, in turn providing control of mechanical properties, thermal stability, enzyme degradation rate, and human mesenchymal stem cell interactions. The mechanistic basis for the control is through the temperature controlled regulation of water vapor, to control crystallization. Control of silk structure via TCWVA represents a significant improvement in the fabrication of silk-based biomaterials, where control of structure-property relationships is key to regulating material properties. This new approach to control crystallization also provides an entirely new green approach, avoiding common methods which use organic solvents (methanol, ethanol) or organic acids. The method described here for silk proteins would also be universal for many other structural proteins (and likely other biopolymers), where water controls chain interactions related to material properties.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Microbiology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f46b15b25c0832bc8b8ec3276e04c769088442fd

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomaterials

In Microbiology

M. Irimia‐Vladu

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Materials fabrication from Bombyx mori silk fibroin (2011, methodology): “10 | 2011 | nature protocols information, we refer the reader to the study by Hu et al.(18), which describes a systematic analysis of crystalline induction through water annealing.”