Silk-based Mechanically Robust Ultrathin Nanocomposites with Tailored Optical Properties

摘要

Integration of inorganic and biological materials has been found to be an elegant way to obtain nanocomposites which display characteristics of the both components. Silk fibroin has attracted a great attention as a template for incorporation of inorganic materials due to its remarkable optical and mechanical properties which make silk-based composites attractive for applications in different fields including tissue engineering, optics and photonics [1-3]. Among other techniques, layer-by-layer (LbL) has been utilized for fabrication of nanoscale hybrid materials with tunable properties and functionalities [4]. Silk fibroin has been also found to perform self-assembly resulting in mechanically strong nanoscale films [5]. In this work we focused on incorporation of clay nanosheets and silver nanoplates into the silk LBL matrix to render unique mechanical and optical properties to the silk- based nanocomposites.