Tuning Chemical and Physical Crosslinks in Silk Electrogels for Morphological Analysis and Mechanical Reinforcement

摘要

Electrochemically controlled, reversible assembly of biopolymers into hydrogel structures is a promising technique for on-demand cell or drug encapsulation and release systems. An electrochemically sol-gel transition has been demonstrated in regenerated Bombyx mori silk fibroin, offering a controllable way to generate biocompatible and reversible adhesives and other biomedical materials. Despite the involvement of an electrochemically triggered electrophoretic migration of the silk molecules, the mechanism of the reversible electrogelation remains unclear. It is, however, known that the freshly prepared silk electrogels (e-gels) adopt a predominantly random coil conformation, indicating a lack of crosslinking as well as thermal, mechanical and morphological stabilities. In the present work, the tuning of covalent and physical β-sheet crosslinks in silk hydrogels was studied for programming the structural properties. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed delicate morphology, including locally aligned fibrillar structures, in silk e-gels, preserved by combining glutaraldehyde-crosslinking and ethanol dehydration. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopic analysis of either electrogelled, vortex-induced or spontaneously formed silk hydrogels showed that the secondary structure of silk e-gels was tunable between non β-sheet dominated and β-sheet dominated states. Dynamic oscillatory rheology confirmed the mechanical reinforcement of silk e-gels provided by controlled chemical and physical crosslinks. The selective incorporation of either chemical or physical or both crosslinks into the electrochemically-responsive, originally unstructured silk e-gel should help in the design for electrochemically-responsive protein polymers.