Abstract
Silkworm silk is a naturally occurring biomaterial. The fibroin component of silk forms two types of crystals. Silk properties depend upon the amount and type of crystals, and their stability. One measure of stability is crystal melting temperature. Crystals which are more stable have a higher melting temperature. Until now, it has been challenging to study thermal behavior of silk crystals because they degrade at high temperature. To avoid degradation, and study the melting properties of silk biomaterial, we heated silk at a very fast rate of 2000K/s using a special calorimeter. We have shown that the two crystal types have very different melting temperatures, indicating that one crystal type is much more stable than the other.
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