The Scientific Research Team Made The World'S Thinnest Silk Fibroin Nanofiber Belt.

Professor Zhang Yaopeng and Shao Huili team of the State Key Laboratory of fiber material modification, Donghua University, have worked with Benjamin S. Hsiao, a professor at New York State University, and proposed a new multilevel structure model for silk, and successfully developed the world's thinnest silk fibroin nanofiber belt.

Recently, the results were published in the full text in the American Chemical Society nanomaterials.

Silk fibroin nanofibers are of great importance to the design and construction of high performance silk fibroin materials, such as artificial spider silk.

The Zhang Yaopeng team used sodium hydroxide / urea aqueous solution system to separate silk into a nanofiber ribbon with a thickness of about 0.4 nm and a width of about 27 nm at low temperature.

This is by far the thinnest silk nanofiber tape in the world. Its thickness is only the single molecular layer thickness of silk fibroin, which is similar to that of single layer graphene.

The nanofiber band is mainly composed of the original beta folded lamella, random coil and alpha helix conformation in natural silk.

The information was confirmed by atomic force microscopy, pmission electron microscopy, and small angle X ray scattering techniques. The dynamic process of silk spinning into silk fibroin nanoscale in sodium hydroxide / urea aqueous solution was simulated by computer molecular dynamics simulation.

Silk fibroin nanofiber bands can be used as enhancements or direct construction units by self-assembly or ordered construction, which is expected to produce excellent or functional silk fibroin based materials.