Preparation of insoluble fibroin films and its tensile property

Silk fibroin is becoming a promising biomate-rial because of its excellent biocompatibility. However, theregenerated fibroin is usually soluble in water and its me-chanical properties should be improved. Although manymethods, such as adding other polymers or treating withmethanol, can ameliorate the mechanical properties andinsolubility, the biocompatibility of fibroin is usually dam-aged in these processes. In this article, it is first reported thatthe insoluble fibroin films are directly prepared withoutmethanol treatment. According to the results of Fouriertransform infrared spectroscope (FTIR) and the X-ray dif-fraction (XRD), the amount of IS-sheet conformation in-creased with the increasing of concentration. When fibroinfilms are dried from 15 wt% at 60℃, the films become in-soluble in water. More importantly, The tensile strength andelongation of the insoluble fibroin films dried from 15% so-lution at 60℃ reached 15.9 MPa and 49.4% respectively in the wet state, which is distinctly superior to the fibroin films treated with methanol.