Preparation and Biocompatibility Characterization of Regenerated Silk Fibroin Films

Abstract

Silk fibroin (SF) has excellent biocompatibility, biodegradability and mechanical properties and has been widely applied in the fields of scaffold materials for tissue engineering, drug delivery materials, etc. Mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs), as one of the most commonly used cells with many remarkable properties for modern biomedicine research fields, can serve as the indicator to characterize the biocompatibility of culture materials according to the cell proliferation. In the research described in this paper we studied the effects of SF films formed by various dissolution methods and various kinds of SF materials on the MEFs cell cultivation. Three groups of different SF films were prepared, namely, mulberry SF films prepared by a LiBr dissolution system, mulberry SF films prepared by a HCOOH/CaCl2 dissolution system and tussah SF films prepared by a HCOOH/CaCl2 dissolution system. The prepared SF films were characterized for morphology and structure by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Further, laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM) and cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8) were utilized to examine the growth of the MEFs on the SF films. The experimental results of the three groups of SF films were compared; they showed that the mulberry SF film, prepared by the LiBr dissolution system, had the best biocompatibility and a positive effect on the growth and proliferation of the MEFs.