A Fast and Reliable Process to Fabricate Regenerated Silk Fibroin Solution from Degummed Silk in 4 Hours

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Abstract

Silk fibroin has a high potential for use in several approaches for technological and biomedical applications. However, industrial production has been difficult to date due to the lengthy manufacturing process. Thus, this work investigates a novel procedure for the isolation of non-degraded regenerated silk fibroin that significantly reduces the processing time from 52 h for the standard methods to only 4 h. The replacement of the standard degumming protocol by repeated short-term microwave treatments enabled the generation of non-degraded degummed silk fibroin. Subsequently, a ZnCl2 solution was used to completely solubilize the degummed fibroin at only 45 °C with an incubation time of only 1 h. Desalting was performed by gel filtration. Based on these modifications, it was possible to generate a cytocompatible aqueous silk fibroin solution from degummed silk within only 4 h, thus shortening the total process time by 48 h without degrading the quality of the isolated silk fibroin solution.

Details

Original languageEnglish
JournalInternational Journal of Molecular Sciences
Volume22
Issue number19
Publication statusPublished - 29 Sept 2021
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85116003153
ORCID /0000-0002-7440-9277/work/142239090

Keywords

Library keywords