| Native silk fibers have been exploited in clinical applications for replacing and strengthening connective tissues including ligaments and tendons and in the closure of wounds. However, more recent work has focused on the use of reconstituted silk to create three dimensional tissue scaffolds that can be used to regenerate living tissue replacements. This work takes advantage of the fact that silk fibroin is a naturally occurring, biocompatible polymer and can be formed into myriad constructs including fibers, films, foams and sponges. While this has opened up numerous new opportunities for the use of silk in biomedical engineering one of the major hurdles has been achieving mechanical properties as robust as those exhibited by natural silk fibroin in a regenerated form. This work explores the effect of the reconstitution process on the quality of the regenerated silk solution and solid constructs through molecular weight, rheological and mechanical analysis. These tests have also provided insight into the self assembly process enabling the optimization of mechanical properties. |
