Growing silk fibroin in advanced materials for food security

Abstract

This perspective provides an overview of the micro-/nanofabrication methods developed for structural biopolymers, highlighting recent advances in the rapid and ease construction of complex and multifunctional silk fibroin-based devices by integrating top-down manufacturing with bottom-up molecular self-assembly. Of particular interest is the development of a new nanofabrication strategy that employs templated crystallization to direct silk fibroin folding and assembly from a suspension of disordered, random coil molecules to ordered, hierarchical mesostructured materials. Such advancements in structural biopolymers fabrication provide the basis for engineering a new generation of technical materials that can be interfaced with food and plants.