Effect of addition of methanol on rheological properties of silk formic acid solution

Recently, many studies have been undertaken on the wet spinning and electrospinning of silk because wet-spun fibers and electrospun webs of silk can be applied in the biomedical and cosmetic fields owing to the good biocompatibility of silk. The rheological properties of silk solution are important because they strongly affect the spinning performance of the silk solution and the structures of resultant fibrous materials. Therefore, as a preliminary study on the effect of solvent composition on the rheological properties of silk fibroin (SF) solution and structure of the resultant film, in the reported work, methanol was added to the SF formic acid solution. A small amount of methanol (i.e. 2%) added to the SF formic acid solution significantly altered the rheological properties of the solution: its shear viscosity increased by 10 folds at low shear and decreased on increasing the shear rate, demonstrating shear thinning behavior of the SF solution. Dynamic tests for the SF solution indicated that the addition of 2% methanol altered the viscous state of the SF formic acid solution to elastic. However, the molecular conformation (i.e. β-sheet conformation) of the regenerated SF film cast from formic acid remained unchanged on the addition of 2% methanol.