Amyloid fibrils are undoubtedly associated to several pathological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and hen egg white lysozyme (HEWL) has been widely used as a model protein to understand the mechanism of amyloid fibrils formation. However, these fibrils have also been gaining a lot of attention as a source of innovative nanomaterials for several technological applications, due to their morphology, functionality and mechanical strength. For example, they have been used in nanofiber-based materials field, as biosensors, bioactive membranes and tissue engineering scaffolds. Nevertheless, most of the methods used so far for the preparation of protein nanofibers can take days, weeks and even months, with the fastest methods reporting 8-15h. Our work presents new and faster fibrillation methods to obtain long and fine nanofibers from HEWL, using imidazolium based ionic liquids and deep eutectic solvents based on cholinium chloride and a range of organic acids, as well as microwave assisted (MW) methodology, reducing the incubation time down to 2h. The influence of experimental variables such as temperature and pH was studied, unveiling their influence in the fibrillation time and nanofibers morphology. These results open a new scope for nanofibers production enabling their application in a wide variety of fields ranging from medicine to soft matter and nanotechnology.

Production of protein nanofibers using new timesaving methodologies for the design of innovative biomedical applications

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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