Silk structure studied with nuclear magnetic resonance

Tetsuo Asakura, Yu Suzuki, Yasumoto Nakazawa, Koji Yazawa, Gregory P. Holland, Jeffery Yarger

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

87 Scopus citations

Abstract

The application of native silk and recombinant silk as biomaterials is a particularly active area. Silk is an attractive biomaterial because of its excellent mechanical properties, that is, the combination of strength and toughness not found in today's man-made materials together with its excellent biocompatibility. The well-developed X-ray diffraction technique was expected to clarify the atomic level structure, but the analysis cannot be used for this purpose because it is difficult to obtain the single crystals that are required to solve the complete molecular structure of silk. The works about B. mori silk fibroin structure before and after spinning were published from Asakura's group. Rotational-Echo Double Resonance is a commonly used ssNMR method for determining conformations in biopolymers through quantitative distance determination.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)23-68
Number of pages46
JournalProgress in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy
Volume69
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2013

Keywords

  • A. Pernyi
  • Anaphe
  • Bombyx mori
  • NMR
  • Poly(Ala-Gly)
  • Polyalanine
  • S. c.ricini
  • Silk fibroin
  • Spider silk

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Analytical Chemistry
  • Biochemistry
  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics
  • Spectroscopy

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