Abstract

Highlights

Intrinsically, super-strong fluorescent silk was fabricated via feeding Bombyx mori silkworms with carbon nanodots.

The multi-functional silks showed no cytotoxicity to Schwann cells and exhibited great potential in bioimaging.

The reinforcing mechanism of multi-functional silks was proposed.

Alternate abstract:

Fluorescent silk is fundamentally important for the development of future tissue engineering scaffolds. Despite great progress in the preparation of a variety of colored silks, fluorescent silk with enhanced mechanical properties has yet to be explored. In this study, we report on the fabrication of intrinsically super-strong fluorescent silk by feeding Bombyx mori silkworm carbon nanodots (CNDs). The CNDs were incorporated into silk fibroin, hindering the conformation transformation, confining crystallization, and inducing orientation of mesophase. The resultant silk exhibited super-strong mechanical properties with breaking strength of 521.9 ± 82.7 MPa and breaking elongation of 19.2 ± 4.3%, improvements of 55.1% and 53.6%, respectively, in comparison with regular silk. The CNDs-reinforced silk displayed intrinsic blue fluorescence when exposed to 405 nm laser and exhibited no cytotoxic effect on cells, suggesting that multi-functional silks would be potentially useful in bioimaging and other applications.

Details

Title
Super-strong and Intrinsically Fluorescent Silkworm Silk from Carbon Nanodots Feeding
Author
Fan, Suna 1 ; Zheng, Xiaoting 1 ; Zhan, Qi 1 ; Zhang, Huihui 1 ; Shao, Huili 1 ; Wang, Jiexin 2 ; Cao, Chengbo 3 ; Zhu, Meifang 1 ; Wang, Dan 2 ; Zhang, Yaopeng 1 

 State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, Shanghai Belt and Road Joint Laboratory of Advanced Fiber and Low-Dimension Materials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Donghua University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China 
 State Key Laboratory of Organic-Inorganic Composites, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, People’s Republic of China 
 School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, People’s Republic of China; School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Yantai University, Yantai, People’s Republic of China 
Pages
1-11
Publication year
2019
Publication date
Dec 2019
Publisher
Springer Nature B.V.
ISSN
23116706
e-ISSN
21505551
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2288659757
Copyright
Nano-Micro Letters is a copyright of Springer, (2019). All Rights Reserved., © 2019. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.