Tuning the Biodegradation Rate of Silk Materials via Embedded Enzymes.

ABSTRACT: Conventional thinking when designing biodegradable materials and devices is to tune the intrinsic properties and morphological features of the material to regulate their degradation rate, modulating traditional factors such as molecular weight and crystallinity. Since regenerated silk protein can be directly thermoplastically molded to generate robust dense silk plastic-like materials, this approach afforded a new tool to control silk degradation by enabling the mixing of a silk-degrading protease into bulk silk material prior to thermoplastic processing. Here we demonstrate the preparation of these silk-based devices with embedded silk-degrading protease to modulate the degradation based on the internal presence of the enzyme to support silk degradation, as opposed to the traditional surf

SUBMITTER: Wu J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12008653 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature