Highly Absorbent Silk Fibroin Protein Xerogel.

Highly absorbent polymers have a wide range of applications in biomaterials, agriculture, physiological products of daily uses, and others. Silk fibroin, as a natural biomaterial with excellent biocompatibility and tunable mechanical properties, shows good prospects in the field of biomedicine applications. However, the dried fibroin hydrogel has very low absorbency. In this work, silk fibroin protein is used as the carrier, riboflavin as the photosensitizer, and accordingly, the hydrogel is prepared by free radical cross-linking under ultraviolet light. The fibroin in the hydrogel contains mainly the random coil structure. The covalent bond cross-linking hinders the crystallization of the silk fibroin, thereby an amorphous silk fibroin hydrogel is obtained. After drying, this xerogel can absorb water 90 times more than its own mass and assimilates a good amount of water within a minute.