Spidroin-Based Biomaterials in Tissue Engineering: General Approaches and Potential Stem Cell Therapies

Figure 3

(a) The strain-stress curve of different fiber materials including Kevlar 46, dragline fiber of N. edulis, Nylon 6,6, and cocoon silk fiber from B. mori; the toughness of N. edulis dragline fiber is illustrated by a colored area. Reproduced from C. Fu et al., 2009, Copyright © 2009, Royal Society of Chemistry. (b) Hierarchical organization of spider silk nanocrystals and deformation profiles of β-sheet crystals at different sizes. Reproduced from S. Keten et al., 2009, Copyright © 2021, Nature Publishing Group. (c) Hierarchical structure of spider silk fiber and nonfiber spidroin materials. Based on the nanofibril network topology and internanofibril interaction strength, silk fibers and nonfiber silk materials are of different fibril arrangements: among silk fibers, silk nanofibrils are bundled along the fibrous axis, while for nonfiber silk materials, silk nanofibrils are interconnected in a nearly random manner. Reproduced from S. Ling et al., 2018, Copyright © 2021, Macmillan Publishers Limited and W. Qiu et al., 2019, Copyright © 2021, Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

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