Structural Analyses of Silk Fibroin from Wild Silkworms and the Application for Cell Adhesive Materials

Abstract

There are many species of wild silkworms in the world. The silk fibroins have very different mechanical properties derived from the difference of the primary and higher-order structures. It means that the silk-like proteins designed to mimic wild silk fibroins could give rise to materials having superior properties. However, silk fibroins from wild silkworms are rarely used as materials unlike Bombyx mori silk fibroin, which is broadly used as a biomaterial. Therefore, the author focused on two kinds of wild silk fibroins, one is from Samia cynthia ricini the other is Anaphe, and produced new silk-like proteins. In this paper, the structure and mechanical properties of the two kinds of silk fibroins were outlined by comparing with those of B. mori. Furthermore, the author summarized the cell adhesion properties of those wild silk-like proteins.