Salt-Leached Silk Scaffoldswith Tunable MechanicalProperties.

Substrate mechanical properties have remarkable influenceson cellbehavior and tissue regeneration. Although salt-leached silk scaffoldshave been used in tissue engineering, applications in softer tissueregeneration can be encumbered with excessive stiffness. In the presentstudy, silk-bound water interactions were regulated by controllingprocessing to allow the preparation of salt-leached porous scaffoldswith tunable mechanical properties. Increasing silk-bound water interactionsresulted in reduced silk II (β-sheet crystal) formation duringsalt-leaching, which resulted in a modulus decrease in the scaffolds.The microstructures as well as degradation behavior were also changed,implying that this water control and salt-leaching approach can beused to achieve tunable mechanical properties. Considering the utilityof silk in various fields of biomedicine, the results point to a newapproach to generate silk scaffolds with controllable properties tobetter mimic soft tissues by combining scaffold preparation methodsand silk self-assembly in aqueous solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]