1. Super Strong and Fluorescent Silk from Silkworms Fed with Carbon Nanodots.
- Author
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Suna Fan, Huili Shao, and Yaopeng Zhang
- Abstract
Fluorescent silk fibroin (SF) fibers have great potential in biomedical application and special functions for marking and tracking. How to fabricate fluorescent SF fibers with good fluorescence stability by a simple and environmentally-friendly method has yet to be explored. Here we successfully produced fluorescent SF fibers by using silkworms as bioreactors to introduce rare-earth upconverting phosphors (UCPs) into silk fibroin. The modified silk exhibited bright green colors under 980 nm laser. Additionally, intrinsically fluorescent silk with reinforced mechanical properties were also fabricated via feeding silkworms with carbon nanodots (CNDs). The addition of CNDs hindered the conformation transformation, confined crystallization, and induced orientation of mesophase, resulting in reinforced silk fibers with breaking strength of 521.9 ± 82.7 MPa and breaking elongation of 19.2 ± 4.3%, 55.1% and 53.6% improvement in comparison to that of normal silk, respectively. The CNDs reinforced silk intrinsically exhibited blue fluorescence under 405 nm laser and good biocompatibility. This directly feeding method to produce fluorescent and reinforced SF fibers is green and environmentally friendly, and easy to use for mass production. Moreover, it provides an idea that SF fibers can be cooperated with more fluorescent materials which could exhibit different colors with certain wavelength of light for bioimaging and other applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019