“…In the literature, the degradation was evaluated by the changes of silk mechanical properties [34], colour [30], crystalline structure by X-ray diffraction [14,18,35], viscosity [36,37], molecular weight of silk component by sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) [38] and molecular weight distribution by SEC [19,30,36,[39][40][41]. As the macroscopic properties (like mechanical endurance) of silk textiles may be reflected by the distribution of fibroin chain length, condition of the historical silk textiles can be evaluated from measurements of the molecular weight distribution of the silk [ref].…”