Antibacterial Composite Of Natural Rubber/Bombyx Mori Silk Fibroin: Preparation And Properties

Natural rubber latex (NR latex) possesses many excellent features such as high intensity of wet gel, good formation of the sheet. Latex products have high elasticity, high elongation and recovery properties, little creep and so on. The products that made of natural rubber are widely used in various fields of social life. Particularly, in the trade of medical health NR is used as latex glove, condom, blood transfusion tube, Foley catheter and so on. However, since NR is not given antibacterial property, many kinds of disease-causing bacteria easily breed on the surface of the products. For example, feculent latex gloves that doctors wear may cause the wound of the patient infected which will lead to associated complaint. One of the conventional Hospital Acquired Infection (HAI) caused by indwelling catheter, include indwelling urinary catheter and central venous catheter. Therefore, endowing NR material with antibacterial property will intensify the extension of applications.Introducing the antimicrobial agent can give NR materials a good antibacterial property. So we prepared natural rubber/silk fibroin (NR/SF) and pre-vulcanized natural rubber/silk fibroin (PVNR/SF) antibacterial composite using bombyx mori silk fibroin as the antimicrobial filler through latex compounding techniques for the first time. The latex system of composite was tested via zeta-sizer analyzer and UV-Vis absorption spectrum. The structure and morphology of rubber sheets were characterized with fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) respectively. The mechanical, thermal and viscoelastic performance of rubber sheets were separately measured by universal tensile machine, thermogravimetric analyzer and dynamic mechanical analyzer.It is proved that the latex system remains stable and there is no condensation of latex after the addition of SF. Thermal stability and viscoelasticity of composite sheets hold the basic characteristics of NR matrix. Meanwhile the tensile strength of composite sheets is enhanced at a certain extent. SEM images describe the good compatibility between SF and NR matrix. Both NR/SF and PVNR/SF antibacterial composite sheets have a good antimicrobial effect for Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. The perfect loading of SF is 0.5～1 wt% according to the results above. Therefore, it can be predicted from the FTIR spectrum that the antibiotic action of SF is related to the structure of amide I in the SF molecules, and the anti-mechanism needs to be further studied.