| Silk is a material with a history dating back thousands of years. Despite this precedent, the past few years have witnessed the launch of a new silk renaissance, one that leverages our ability to solubilize and reform silk cocoons to create materials including films, gels, and tissue engineering scaffolds. Further, these products are easily functionalized through the direct addition of chemical or biological agents in solution. Two techniques that are introduced here represent new approaches for the fabrication of functional silk surfaces: E-gel films and natural silk mats.;E-gel films rely upon the application of direct current to a regenerated silk solution while using a ring-shaped anode. Notably, this approach allows for films with a range of three-dimensional topologies to be formed, with exceptionally low surface roughness on the order of Angstroms. Natural silk mats are spun directly by the silkworm through influencing its innate behavior, constraining the heights available for the creation of anchor points. A threshold height is approximated below which silkworms will spin flat sheets and above which they will encapsulate themselves in cocoons. Furthermore, the resulting mats can be functionalized through the addition of drugs, dyes, and other molecules directly to the silkworm's mulberry leaf-based diet. Functional materials, including antibacterial silk, were produced and validated in this study. |
