A novel method to prepare mineralized fibroin fiber

Abstract

In this paper, a novel method was developed to prepare mineralized fibroin fiber. We used fibroin gel to control the biomineralization of calcium phosphate and obtained one kind of mineralized fibroin fiber with the length of 1 2 mm. It has the potential to be used to enhance the strength of tissue engineering scaffold. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) results showed that hydroxyapatite (HA) was mainly deposited on the surface of mineralized fiber. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) results displayed the red shifts of absorption bands of amide II and amide III (9 and 5 cm^-1, respectively), which were related to the strong chemical interaction between HA and fibroin. It was also found that HA was at low content (12.5%) and the ability of gelled fibroin to induce mineralization decreased greatly because of the formation of ?-structures in gelled fibroin molecules, which showed the importance of molecular structure in the regulation of the biomineralization process.