Natural Fibrous Protein for Advanced Tissue Engineering Applications: Focusing on Silk Fibroin and Keratin

As one of the important branches of natural biopolymer, natural fibrous protein has a lot of advantages including good mechanical properties, excellent biocompatibility, controllable biodegradability, renewability, abundant sources, and so on. Moreover, n

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Natural Fibrous Protein for Advanced Tissue Engineering Applications: Focusing on Silk Fibroin and Keratin Yuejiao Yang, Jie Chen, Claudio Migliaresi, and Antonella Motta

Abstract

As one of the important branches of natural biopolymer, natural fibrous protein has a lot of advantages including good mechanical properties, excellent biocompatibility, controllable biodegradability, renewability, abundant sources, and so on. Moreover, natural fibrous protein is also a protein that could only be used for structure supporting without any bioactivities, which attracts a lot of attentions in the field of tissue engineering scaffold. This chapter is taking silk fibroin and keratin as model materials of natural fibrous protein, focusing on their protein structure, chemical compositions, processing and extraction methods, chemical modification methods, and their applications in tissue engineering through advanced manufacturing. Keywords

Natural fibrous protein · Silk fibroin · Keratin · Processing · Extraction · Chemical modification · Tissue engineering Y. Yang · C. Migliaresi · A. Motta (*) Department of Industrial Engineering and BIOtech Research Center, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] J. Chen School of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

3.1

General Introduction of Natural Fibrous Protein

With the development of technology, the draining away of sources of materials and energy is becoming a serious topic all over the world. As a sequence, producing synthesized polymers with lower cost of resources is facing the challenge [1]. Over the past half century, explorations and applications of advanced technologies provide the possibilities to approach new materials, and natural polymers are becoming more and more popular. As a sustainable material, because of its rich resources, wide varieties, and degradability, natural polymer is showing an important position. A large number of different kinds of natural polymers are classified as natural biopolymers, because of good biocompatibility and biodegradability, like alginate, cellulose, collagen, starch, and chitosan. These materials are already well studied and applied widely in biomedical and biomaterial fields. The main study subjects of natural biopolymers are sugar, nucleic acid, and protein. Proteins are formed by polymerization of amino acids according to the sequence of genetic code in mRNA. As one of the most important macromolecules in organisms, protein takes part in almost all the physiological activities and functions. Proteins can be classified into many categories based on different criterions. According to different structures of the molecules, there are two

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 H. J. Chun et al. (eds.), Bioinspired Biomaterials, Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology 1249, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3258-0_3

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main classes: globular protein and fibrous protein. Globular proteins are normally spherical or globular in shape,