Silk micrococoons for protein stabilisation and molecular encapsulation

Abstract

Naturally spun silks generate fibres with unique properties, including strength, elasticity and biocompatibility. Here we describe a microfluidics-based strategy to spin liquid native silk, obtained directly from the silk gland of Bombyx mori silkworms, into micron-scale capsules with controllable geometry and variable levels of intermolecular β-sheet content in their protein shells. We demonstrate that such micrococoons can store internally the otherwise highly unstable liquid native silk for several months and without apparent effect on its functionality. We further demonstrate that these native silk micrococoons enable the effective encapsulation, storage and release of other aggregation-prone proteins, such as functional antibodies. These results show that native silk micrococoons are capable of preserving the full activity of sensitive cargo proteins that can aggregate and lose function under conditions of bulk storage, and thus represent an attractive class of materials for the storage and release of active biomolecules.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Shimanovich, U. Ruggeri, F.S. De Genst, E. Adamcik, J. Barros, T.P. Porter, D. Müller, T. Mezzenga, R. Dobson, C.M. Vollrath, F. Holland, C. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0913-2221 Knowles, T.P.J.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2017. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords:	Biomaterials – proteins; Biophysical chemistry; Intrinsically disordered proteins
Dates:	Accepted: 12 May 2017 Published (online): 19 July 2017 Published: 19 July 2017
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	05 Sep 2017 15:27
Last Modified:	06 Nov 2018 13:09
Published Version:	https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15902
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Publishing Group
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/ncomms15902
Related URLs:	Author
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:120874

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)

Silk micrococoons for protein stabilisation and molecular encapsulation

Abstract

Metadata

Download

Published Version

Export

Statistics