A Fast and Reliable Process to Fabricate Regenerated Silk Fibroin Solution from Degummed Silk in 4 Hours |
| |
Authors: | Michael Wltje Arthur Klbel Dilbar Aibibu Chokri Cherif |
| |
Affiliation: | Institute of Textile Machinery and High-Performance Material Technology, Faculty of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Technische Universität Dresden, 01069 Dresden, Germany; (A.K.); (D.A.); (C.C.) |
| |
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. |
| |
Keywords: | silk fibroin degumming ZnCl2 gel filtration |
|
|