Keratin from Bovine Horn as a Biomaterial for Wound Healing Application

Introduction Keratins are strong fibrous proteins with high degree of stability, found in hair, wool and in hard tissues such as horn, hoof, and nail. Keratin biomaterials in the form of sponge, films were developed from wool and human hair for various biomedical applications such as wound dressings and neural tissue engineering application. In the present work, an effort has been made to extract and characterize keratin from bovine horn and establish a comparison between two methods of extraction using two reducing agents, viz Thioglycolic acid and βMercaptoethanol. The chemical and structural characteristics of these samples were compared to raw horn samples. Further, the extracted and purified keratin was used as a scaffold to support normal skin fibroblast proliferation growth.