Study On The Transparent Silk Fibroin Film As Corneal Cell Carrier

Silk protein as an excellent natural polymer fibrin has been widely applied in the field of biomedical materials. It has reliable source, easy to obtain, good mechanical properties, good biocompatibility and tissue compatibility.This paper explores the feasibility of the transparent silk fibroin film as the corneal repair materials. The small molecules amides were mixed with silk fibroin to obtain composite membrane. Its mechanical properties, light transmission properties, and cell compatibility were detected and X- ray diffraction was used to study the structure of silk fibroin composite membrane. The results showed that when small amount of amide was added to silk fibroin. The composite film was mainly Silk I crystal structure. With the increase of the content of amide, the composite film was mainly composed of the Silk II crystalline structure. Mechanical tests showed that the fracture strength of the composite film was lower than pure silk fibroin films, but amides improved its flexibility and made the elongation at break increase. Dissolution rate and swelling results showed that the addition of the amide solvent greatly reduced the loss rate of the composite film and it had low swelling. Using a micro plate reader to detect the light transmission properties of the composite film, and the light transmittance of the composite film was tested for a long period of time. The results showed that the amide / silk fibroin membrane had stable transmittance.The rabbit corneal stoma cells were extracted in vitro. To study the biocompatibility between silk fibroin membranes with corneal cells carrier, the corneal stoma cells were seeded on silk fibroin films and silk films treated with ethanol. A hemocytometer was used to count cell adhesion rates in different time. Cell growth activity was measured using Alamar Blue for different days. The growth morphology of corneal stoma cells was observed by inverted fluorescence microscope. Extracellular collagen secretion was dyed by Masson kits. The results showed that between amide / silk fibroin film and corneal stoma cell membrane had no significantly difference. So, the amide / fibroin membrane could support corneal stoma cells normal growth and amide / silk fibroin composite membrane was expected to be used for corneal tissue repair material.