Abstract
Silk fibroin has a high potential for use in several approaches for technological and biomedical applications. However, industrial production has been difficult to date due to the lengthy manufacturing process. Thus, this work investigates a novel procedure for the isolation of non-degraded regenerated silk fibroin that significantly reduces the processing time from 52 h for the standard methods to only 4 h. The replacement of the standard degumming protocol by repeated short-term microwave treatments enabled the generation of non-degraded degummed silk fibroin. Subsequently, a ZnCl2 solution was used to completely solubilize the degummed fibroin at only 45 °C with an incubation time of only 1 h. Desalting was performed by gel filtration. Based on these modifications, it was possible to generate a cytocompatible aqueous silk fibroin solution from degummed silk within only 4 h, thus shortening the total process time by 48 h without degrading the quality of the isolated silk fibroin solution.
Highlights
The Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectra of these analyses show peaks for carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, which are commonly associated with elements in proteins
Bombyx mori cocoons were cut into small pieces and 2 g cocoon pieces were heated for 1 min in 125 mL of an aqueous solution of 0.02 M Na2 CO3 (Grüssing, Filsum, Germany) and 0.25% sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) in a 500 mL Duran® bottle in a microwave (Clatronic microwave degumming (MW) 749, Clatronic International GmbH, Kempen, Germany) at 800 W
A new method for the preparation of regenerated silk fibroin solution is presented that is feasible in significantly less time than the most widely used methods in the literature (4 h versus 52 h)
Summary
The possibility of using silk fibroin in a wide variety of formats such as films, scaffolds, hydrogels, and micro- or nanoparticles for drug delivery, has led to many interesting applications in medical research (reviewed in detail in [1]). These properties make silk fibroin attractive for the development of new advanced silk-based materials for soft bioelectronics. These soft systems include bioresorbable electronics for wearable sensors, electronic skins, and flexible energy devices (extensively reviewed in [2])
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