Wild Silkworm Cocoon Waste Conversion into Tough Regenerated Silk Fibers by Solution Spinning.

Abstract

Wild silkworm silk fibers have garnered attention owing to their softness, natural color, lightweight, and excellent mechanical properties. Because most wild silkworm cocoons obtained are pierced or dirty after the eclosion process, it is difficult to reel the long filament from the pierced cocoons to use as textile materials. Therefore, damaged wild silkworm cocoons are typically removed during the industrial process. Artificial silk spinning has been developed to transform domesticated silkworm silk solutions into regenerated silk fibers. However, regenerated fibers derived from wild silkworm silk have not been reported. Here, we produced regenerated silk fibers using a dry-wet spinning method using a dope solution derived from wild silkworm silk cocoon wastes. These regenerated silk fibers have thick and uniform diameters, unlike native silk fibers, contributing to their usefulness for sterilization and handling in medical applications. Moreover, they exhibited the same level of mechanical strength as their native counterparts. The molecular orientation and crystallinity of the regenerated silk fibers were adjustable by the drawing process, enabling the realization of their various tensile properties. This study promotes the utilization of unused protein resources to produce mechanically stable and tough silk-based fibers.