Environment-Induced Silk Fibroin Conformation Based on the Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

Recently, silk fibroin has been widely attended for its biomedical material applications, because of its excellent properties such as strength, flexibility, biocompatibility and permeability (Altman et al., 2003).Compared with the silk fibroin from silkworm, spider fibroin has higher strength and stronger toughness, but its resource is limited.So people have tried to synthesize the spider fibroin using genetic recombination method to obtain the spider fibers (Fukushima, 1998;Heslot, 1998; Zhou et al., 2001).Shao et al. (Shao & Vollrath, 2002) demonstrated that although the amino acid sequence of Bombyx mori silkworm fibroin is different from that of spider fibroin, by controlling the process of the silkworm spinning, the high strength of the silk fiber as that of the spider fiber can be gained.The investigations indicate that there are the correlations among spinning process, secondary structure and mechanical properties of the silk fibroin.The environment of the silkworm spinning is changed during the process, such as shearing strength (Chen et al.