earticle

영어

Brand-new ideas with silk materials have enabled to widen applications of silkworm silk (especially, fibroin) beyond clothes to food, optical device, scaffold, gel, film, and so on. However, relatively poor biodegradation and cell adhesive ability have hindered its wide range of application for cell and tissue engineering. For this reason, many attempts to develop characteristics of fibroin as a tissue engineering material have tried. Here, we attempted to improve characteristics of silk fibroin by introduction of recombinant mussel adhesive proteins (MAPs). Mussel can strongly affix to the wet surfaces by using secretion of MAPs and maintain its adhesive force and flexibility even under harsh conditions. Previously, we successfully mass-produced recombinant MAP in bacterial expression system. We also designed and constructed RGD peptide-fused recombinant MAP as a new cell adhesive which leads better cell attachment, spreading, proliferation, and even differentiation. By co-electrospinning of MAP-RGD with silk fibroin, we fabricated nanofiber sheet as tissue engineering scaffold and investigated cell behaviors on the constructed nanofibrous scaffold. Above all, the constructed nanofibrous scaffold with silk fibroin and MAP has a lot of potentials for functionalization of biomolecules which be used for advanced bioactivity or cell and tissue engineering without complicate modification of scaffold surface.