Abstract
Spider silks are increasingly gaining interest for potential use as biomaterials in tissue engineering and biomedical applications. Owing to their facile and versatile processability in native and regenerated forms, they can be easily tuned via chemical synthesis or recombinant technologies to address specific issues required for applications. In the past few decades, native spider silk and recombinant silk materials have been explored for a wide range of applications due to their superior strength, toughness, and elasticity as well as biocompatibility, biodegradation, and nonimmunogenicity. Herein, we present an overview of the recent advances in spider silk protein that fabricate biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Beginning with a brief description of biological and mechanical properties of spidroin-based materials and the cellular regulatory mechanism, this review summarizes various types of spidroin-based biomaterials from genetically engineered spider silks and their prospects for specific biomedical applications (e.g., lung tissue engineering, vascularization, bone and cartilage regeneration, and peripheral nerve repair), and finally, we prospected the development direction and manufacturing technology of building more refined and customized spidroin-based protein scaffolds.
Highlights
Spider silk has attracted much attention for thousands of years due to its resilience, toughness, and biocompatibility
The in vitro cell experiment results showed that dental pulp stem cells (DPSCs) had a larger tendency of arrangement and extension on the spider silk matrix, while fibroblasts and osteoblasts had a smaller tendency of arrangement and extension, suggesting that these fibers may be recognized as an effective matrix for DPSCs to differentiate along more elongated cell morphology under appropriate growth environment [44]
Recombinant spidroin can be processed into materials of different dimensions to meet the requirements of different tissue morphology, structures, and mechanical properties
Summary
Spider silk has attracted much attention for thousands of years due to its resilience, toughness, and biocompatibility. Each type of silk fiber presents unique mechanical properties, internal structure, and composition, all determined by their functions [4, 5]. Compared with natural fibers and synthetic materials, spider silks exhibit a well-balanced combination of stiffness and elasticity, which perfectly satisfies scaffold biomaterial’s mechanical and biological requirements for tissue engineering. Spider silk is a protein biopolymer that varies in physicochemical and biological properties due to a variation in structure and composition Based on this processability, researchers manage to use natural or recombinant spider silk. Proteins as raw material to manufacture tailor-made scaffolds with controllable structures and outstanding properties for diverse tissues or applications. We will discuss spidroin-based scaffolds with different dimensions and their applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine as shown, to demonstrate the great potential of spidroinbased material in the biomedical engineering field. We make an outlook about the development of the next-generation multifunctional spidroin-based scaffold through the manufacturing process, genetic engineering, and molecular biology
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
