Xue Ye, Hu Xiao
Department of Physics & Astronomy, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ 08028, USA.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ 08028, USA.
Polymers (Basel). 2020 May 11;12(5):1093. doi: 10.3390/polym12051093.
In this study, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) nanosheets and silk fibroin (SF) proteins were combined and electrospun into BNSF nanofibers with different ratios. It was found that the surface morphology and crosslinking density of the nanofibers can be tuned through the mixing ratios. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy study showed that pure SF electrospun fibers were dominated by random coils and they gradually became α-helical structures with increasing h-BN nanosheet content, which indicates that the structure of the nanofiber material is tunable. Thermal stability of electrospun BNSF nanofibers were largely improved by the good thermal stability of BN, and the strong interactions between BN and SF molecules were revealed by temperature modulated differential scanning calorimetry (TMDSC). With the addition of BN, the boundary water content also decreased, which may be due to the high hydrophobicity of BN. These results indicate that silk-based BN composite nanofibers can be potentially used in biomedical fields or green environmental research.
在本研究中，将六方氮化硼（h-BN）纳米片与丝素蛋白（SF）相结合，并通过静电纺丝制备出不同比例的BNSF纳米纤维。研究发现，通过混合比例可以调节纳米纤维的表面形态和交联密度。傅里叶变换红外光谱研究表明，纯SF静电纺丝纤维以无规卷曲为主，随着h-BN纳米片含量的增加，它们逐渐转变为α-螺旋结构，这表明纳米纤维材料的结构是可调节的。BN良好的热稳定性极大地提高了静电纺丝BNSF纳米纤维的热稳定性，温度调制差示扫描量热法（TMDSC）揭示了BN与SF分子之间的强相互作用。随着BN的加入，边界水含量也降低，这可能是由于BN的高疏水性所致。这些结果表明，基于丝素的BN复合纳米纤维在生物医学领域或绿色环境研究中具有潜在的应用价值。
