Natural Silk Spinning‐Inspired Meso‐Assembly‐Processing Engineering Strategy for Fabricating Soft Tissue‐Mimicking Biomaterials

Spider silk inspires tunable artificial biomaterials

30 September 2022

Inspired by spider silk, scientists have fabricated biomaterials whose structures and mechanical properties can be tuned to match soft tissues in the body.

Spider silk is a remarkable material that is simultaneously lightweight and incredibly strong. The secret to its remarkable properties lies in the way it combines various levels of structures ranging from the mesoscale to the molecular scale.

Now, by mimicking the spider-silk spinning process, a team led by researchers from ShanghaiTech University in China has produced silk fibroin biomaterials with exceptional mechanical properties.

Importantly, the mechanical properties could be tuned to match those of soft tissues such as skin and muscle and biological materials such as keratin and collagen.

The team also demonstrated the use of their biomaterials for controlling the shape of mammalian and cancer cells, and thereby help cells to recover some of their physiological functions.

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References

1. Advanced Functional Materials 32, 2200267 (2022). doi: 10.1002/adfm.202200267