Abstract
This report focuses on current possibilities and perspectives of scanning X-ray nanodiffraction for probing nanoscale heterogeneities in silk fibers such as nanofibrillar skin-core morphologies, nanocrystalline inclusions and fine fibers down to submicron diameters.
Highlights
Progress in mimicking biological silk production and designing advanced functional materials relies on understanding silks hierarchical organization and its relation to macroscopic function
The skin-core morphology of major ampullate silks (MaS) fibers has been investigated by scanning nanoXRD and the presence of two proteneous layers -suggested by biochemical and spectroscopic studies (Sponner et al, 2007)—has been confirmed
One of the MaS layers appears to be amorphous with nanofibrillar morphology
Summary
Progress in mimicking biological silk production and designing advanced functional materials relies on understanding silks hierarchical organization and its relation to macroscopic function. Β-sheet nanodomains of several nm size, embedded in an amorphous matrix of protein chains, are basic functional elements of MaS fibers observed by wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) (Fraser and MacRae, 1973). This two-phase model is used in various molecular modeling approaches based on phenomenological or molecular dynamics approaches for simulating protein chain behavior in the amorphous phase (Termonia, 1994; Papadopoulos et al, 2009; Su and Buehler, 2016; Puglisi et al, 2017). Range allows visualizing atomic-scale or morphological-scale features (Riekel et al, 2009, 2017)
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