Southwestern University Professor Xia Qingyou Has Made Important Progress In The Research Of Functional Silk.

Southwestern University reported in January 9th that silk is an excellent protein fiber, which is widely used in textile and garment industry.

As a natural polymer protein, silk protein has wide application prospects in the field of materials science.

Recently, Acta Biomaterialia, a leading journal in the field of biomaterials, published online research papers on biological research center of the frontier Interdisciplinary Research Institute of Southwestern University, and a research and development center of Chongqing silk fiber new material engineering technology center, entitled "genetic modification of new silk materials with dual functions of promoting cell proliferation and anti-inflammatory".

The researchers successfully applied the silk fibroin polygene bioreactor system to the simultaneous expression of two recombinant proteins of human basic fibroblast growth factor and human pfer cell growth factor into silk fiber, and established a new silkworm material strain that could be stable and inherited, so as to achieve the efficient and low cost production of new double growth factor silk.

Subsequently, the researchers systematically confirmed that the double growth factor new silk has many functions, such as slow release, promoting cell proliferation, promoting collagen synthesis and anti-inflammatory, and so on. It is expected to develop a composite functional silk biological material, which will play an important role in promoting the application of silk in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Dr. Wang Yuancheng and associate professor Wang Feng are the first authors of the thesis. Professor Xia Qingyou is the author of the thesis.

It is reported that another group of research papers on the development of functional silk protein hydrogel biomaterials, "sericin protein hydrogel prepared with FGF1 gene engineering silk", was also published in Acta Biomaterialia magazine in August 2018. This research system explains the application potential of FGF1 functional silk gel hydrogel as a new biomaterial in the field of tissue and medical engineering, and provides a new strategy for genetic improvement and design of foreign protein functionalized silk based biomaterials.