Silk nanofibre arranging improves its fibre mat transparency

Silk fibroin, produced by the silkworm Bombyx mori, has been receiving full recognition as a biomaterial. Since nanofibres are generally in similar dimensions to biological fibres in extracellular matrices, characteristic interaction of nanofibres with cells is widely known, which is different from the conventional materials in micron scale. In the current study, nanofibre mats were produced from silk fibroins. Although silk fibroin does not absorb any visible light, silk fibroin nanofibre mats were opaque and lost transparency to visible light. This is a disadvantage to scaffolds used in cornea tissue engineering although silk nanofibres are still attractive as biomaterial. We tried to improve the transparency of silk fibroin nanofibre mats to visible light, mimicking the mechanism adopted in biological cornea tissues. The objective of this study is to increase the transmittance of silk fibroin nanofibre mats to visible light by modifying the nanofibre orientation in the mats. We showed that by increasing the orientation of nanofibres, there was an increased transmittance to the long wavelength range of the visible light. However, the transmittance to short wavelength range did not increase. One way to improve transparency would be to orient the nanofibres in its non-woven mats.