objective: one of the major issues in bone tissue engineering is the design and fabrication of bioactive, bioresorbable porous 3d scaffolds capable of maintaining their structure and integrity over a predictable period of time. one such approach is the fabrication of composite scaffolds. methods: in this study we present fabrication and characterization of novel silk/bioglass-composite scaffold...

Silk scaffolds having biomimetic hierarchical porous structures were achieved by carefully tuning liquid-liquid separation in regenerated silk fibroin solutions. Such scaffolds show greatly enhanced cellular responses.

Controlling the mechanism of self-assembly in proteins has emerged as a potent tool for various biomedical applications. Silk fibroin self-assembly consists of gradual conformational transition from random coil to β-sheet structure. In this work we elucidated the intermediate secondary conformation in the presence of Ca(2+) ions during fibroin self-assembly. The interaction of fibroin and calci...

Silk fibroin can be made into various forms of biocompatible medical materials, including hydrogel due to its excellent properties. Here, we report a novel method for the preparation of electropolymerized silk fibroin hydrogel membrane (ESFHM), which is formed on a nanoporous film as a barrier using a homemade device at a higher DC voltage. Regenerated silk fibroin solution in Tris buffer (pH 6...

The addition of exogenous histones has an inhibitory effect on fibroin gene transcription in posterior silk gland extracts. The histones probably disturb a process in complex formation, because when transcription complexes were constructed by preincubation of the templates with the extracts, the inhibitory effect of histones was greatly reduced. Transcription of a fibroin gene construct, pFb5' ...

The objective of the present study is to investigate the possibility of preparing pure protein microspheres from regenerated silk fibroin (RSF). It is found that RSF microspheres, with predictable and controllable sizes ranging from 0.2 to 1.5 mm, can be prepared via mild selfassembling of silk fibroin molecular chains. The merits of this novel method include a rather simple production apparatu...

Regenerated silk fibroin has been proposed as a material substrate for biomedical, optical, and electronic applications. Preparation of the silk fibroin solution requires extraction (degumming) to remove contaminants, but results in the degradation of the fibroin protein. Here, a mechanism of fibroin degradation is proposed and the molecular weight and polydispersity is characterized as a funct...

Silk fibroin exists in a number of different states, such as silk I and silk II, with different properties largely defined by differences in secondary structure composition. Numerous attempts have been made to control the transitions from silk I to silk II in vitro to produce high-performance materials. Of all the factors influencing the structural compositions, pH and some metal ions play impo...

Bombyx mori (BM) silk fibroin is composed of two different subunits: heavy chain and light chain fibroin linked by a covalent disulfide bond. Current methods of separating the two silk fractions is complicated and produces inadequate quantities of the isolated components for the study of the individual light and heavy chain silks with respect to new materials. We report a simple method of separ...

Conductive polymers are interesting materials for a number of biological and medical applications requiring electrical stimulation of cells or tissues. Highly conductive polymers (polypyrrole and polyaniline)/Antheraea mylitta silk fibroin coated fibers are fabricated successfully by in situ polymerization without any modification of the native silk fibroin. Coated fibers characterized by scann...