To produce biocompatible, mechanically robust and conductive materials for tissue engineering applications, a simple chemical oxidation method using sodium hyprochlorite (NaClO) was developed to induce carboxyl group into silk fibroin (SF) protein. The extent of carboxyl group was characterized by electrical conductivity titration method[1], and the resulting protein structure was analyzed with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR). Introduction of carboxyl group facilitated rapid conversion of the protein from a random coil to a β-sheet structure as well as self-assemble into nano-particles in the solution (Fig.1), the result was confirmed by circular dichroism (CD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM). In addition, we demonstrate that the nano-particles in silk derivative solution have strong positive contribution to the mechanical properties of silk based scaffold, with about 100 times of compression modulus compared to the control scaffolds. To further study the biochemical properties of the materials, the silk derivative scaffolds were mineralized in CaCl2-Na2HPO4 solution. Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) were grown on these scaffolds to assess the biocompatibility of these materials. Acknowledgements This research was supported by the National Forestry Public Welfare Industry Research Project (201304609), the Natural Science Foundation of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China (12KJA220001), Doctorate Fellowship Foundation of Nanjing Forestry University Reference: [1] Saito T, Isogai A. 2004. TEMPO-mediated oxidation of native cellulose. The effect of oxidation conditions on chemical and crystal structures of the water-insoluble fractions. Biomacromolecules.

Inducing silk fibroin nano-particles by chemical oxidation

251st National Meeting (2016)

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