Abstract
Silk fibroin from the silkworm, Bombyx mori, has excellent properties such as biocompatibility, biodegradation, non-toxicity, adsorption properties, etc. As a kind of ideal biomaterial, silk fibroin has been widely used since it was first utilized for sutures a long time ago. The degradation behavior of silk biomaterials is obviously important for medical applications. This article will focus on silk-based biomaterials and review the degradation behaviors of silk materials.
Highlights
What is a biomaterial? Biomaterial can be defined as "any substance or combination of substances synthetic or natural in origin, which can be used any time, as a whole or as a part of a system which treats, augments, or replaces any tissue, organ or function of the body"[1].Theoretically, any material, natural or man-made, can be a biomaterial as long as it serves the stated medical and surgical purposes
Native silk fiber consists of two types of self-assembled proteins: fibroin and sericin [23,24]
In the final molecular assembly of the proteins into silk fibers, the hydrophobic domains play an important role [35]. These domains take up a large portion of silk fibroin and are responsible for insolubility, the high strength of fibers and the thermal stability of the silk fibers which lead to the formation of β-sheet secondary structure [32]
Summary
What is a biomaterial? Biomaterial can be defined as "any substance (other than a drug) or combination of substances synthetic or natural in origin, which can be used any time, as a whole or as a part of a system which treats, augments, or replaces any tissue, organ or function of the body"[1]. Natural biodegradable polymers like collagen, gelatin, chitosan and silk fibroin have promising advantages over synthetic polymers due to their favorable properties, including good biocompatibility, biodegradability and bioresorbability. Their physical and chemical properties can be modified to achieve desirable mechanical and degradation characteristics. Among these natural polymers, silk fibroin provides an important set of material options for biomaterials and scaffolds in biomedical applications because of its high tensile strength, controllable biodegradability, haemostatic properties, non-cytotoxicity, low antigenicity and noninflammatory characteristics [3,4,5]. This article will focus on the silk-based biomaterials, and review the degradation behaviors of silk materials
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