Evaluation of Silk Inverse Opals for “Smart” Tissue Culture

Abstract

Visually tracking the subtle aspects of biological systems in real time during tissue culture remains challenging. Herein, we demonstrate the use of bioactive, cytocompatible, and biodegradable inverse opals from silk as a multifunctional substrate to transduce both the optical information and cells during tissue culture. We show that these substrates can visually track substrate degradation in various proteases during tissue digestion and protein deposition during the growth of mesenchymal stem cells. Uniquely, these substrates can be integrated in multiple steps of tissue culture for simple-to-use, visual, and quantitative detectors of bioactivity. These substrates can also be doped, demonstrated here with gold nanoparticles, to allow additional control of cell functions.

Modulation of Multiscale 3D Lattices through Conformational Control: Painting Silk Inverse Opals with Water and Light

“…The rapid and irreversible response to water vapor of the SIOs can optically detect and record the surrounding humidity, potentially serving as colorimetric probes for environmentally controlled areas, such as food storage spaces, which cannot be achieved by using reversible humidity sensors. The ability to have “Petri dish” sized programmable, biocompatible nanopatterns could enable an interesting direction in cell‐binding experiments where spectrally responsive 3D geometries of different sizes can be designed to study the cellular adhesion interface …”

Multiscale Modeling of Silk and Silk‐Based Biomaterials—A Review

“…These techniques open opportunities in supramolecular chemistry to create silk‐based biomaterials with novel electrical, optical, or mechanical properties, alone or in combination with, for example, hydroxyapatite, nanocellulose, or graphene and graphene oxide . Some of these applications include, just to name a few, biophotonic devices with structural color changes for biological or mechanical sensing; flexible electronic devices for monitoring in soft and curved biological systems; stimuli responsive biomaterials based on protein folding–unfolding for drug delivery; or silk‐reinforced green elastomeric composites for soft robotics and flexible tubes . Using recombinant DNA techniques to create non‐natural proteins (like the aforementioned work with SELPs) is another promising approach to develop new silk‐based materials.…”

Inkjet Printing of Patterned, Multispectral, and Biocompatible Photonic Crystals

“…The inverse opal structure generated on the silk substrate offers an instantaneous way to exploit material transience [60][61][62][63][64][65] and makes messages disappear as a function of protein conformation and assembly. Silk films can be controlled to have programmable solubility as a function of the physical crosslinks (i.e.…”