CNR-STIIMA (National Research Council - Institute of Intelligent Industrial Technologies and Systems for Advanced Manufacturing), Corso Giuseppe Pella 16, 13900 Biella, Italy.
CNR-IPCB (National Research Council - Institute for Polymers, Composites and Biomaterials), Mostra d'Oltremare, Pad. 20, V.le J.F. Kennedy 54, 80125 Napoli, Italy.
Int J Biol Macromol. 2021 Nov 1;190:375-381. doi: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2021.09.007. Epub 2021 Sep 7.
Protein-based nanomaterials are gaining growing interest in biomedical field. The present paper evaluates the physico-chemical properties of electrospun nanofibers resulting from the combination of gelatin with keratin (from wool) and sericin (from silk) to validate their use for in vitro interaction studies. We demonstrated that that presence of sericin influences the fiber morphology at macroscopic level - i.e., wide diameter distributions by SEM and image analysis - with effects on chemical - i.e., a decrease of hydrogen bonds of NH groups verified by infrared spectroscopy - and thermal behavior of electrospun nanofibers, in comparison with gelatin-based ones. Moreover, we verified that sericin, in combination with keratin macromolecules, can amplify the biochemical signal of gelatin, improving the in-vitro stability of gelatin-based nanofibers. In vitro results confirm a synergistic effect of sericin and keratin on human Mesenchymal Stem Cells (hMSC) proliferation - increase over 50% respect to other types - associated to the enhancement of in vitro stability directly ascribable to the peculiar physical interaction among the proteins. These findings suggest the use of sericin/keratin/gelatin enriched electrospun fibers as nanostructured platforms for interface tissue engineering.
基于蛋白质的纳米材料在生物医学领域越来越受到关注。本文评估了电纺纳米纤维的物理化学性质，这些纤维是由明胶与角蛋白（来自羊毛）和丝胶（来自丝绸）结合而成，以验证它们在体外相互作用研究中的用途。我们证明了丝胶的存在会影响纤维的宏观形态，即 SEM 和图像分析显示的较宽直径分布，这会影响纤维的化学性质，即红外光谱验证的 NH 基团氢键减少，以及与基于明胶的纤维相比，电纺纳米纤维的热行为。此外，我们还验证了丝胶与角蛋白大分子结合，可以放大明胶的生化信号，提高基于明胶的纳米纤维的体外稳定性。体外结果证实了丝胶和角蛋白对人骨髓间充质干细胞（hMSC）增殖的协同作用——比其他类型增加了 50%以上——这与蛋白质之间特殊的物理相互作用直接导致的体外稳定性的提高有关。这些发现表明，富含丝胶/角蛋白/明胶的电纺纤维可用作界面组织工程的纳米结构平台。
