Fig. 7: Applications of protein fibers and meshes in textiles and biomedical applications.

a Commercially available wrist band for watches made from wet-spun recombinant spider silk fibers. b Regenerated collagen type I fibers have been used as suture materials for medical device manufacturing. (i) SEM image of an extruded single fiber. (ii) The photograph depicts 56 collagen fiber strands braided and knotted together forming a fiber bundle. (iii) Stress-strain curve of a fiber bundle. (iv) Confocal images show human tenocytes attached to the microfibers. Living cells were stained with CMFDA (5-chloromethylfluorescein diacetate, green), the nuclei were stained with DAPI (blue). Adapted and modified with permission from ref. ¹⁷⁹, copyright Elsevier, 2021. c Wet-spun collagen fibers used for muscle tissue engineering. (i) Fibers showed the typical collagen band pattern with a periodicity of 67 nm. (ii) The fibers showed a maximum stress of ~241 MPa and a strain of ~17%. (iii) The wet-spun fibers were highly processable, like in flat woven structures. (iv) The wet-spun collagen fibers were used for cultivating myoblasts (muscle cells, green) and fibroblasts (endothelial cells, red) in co-culture, showing collagen fibers to be a versatile scaffold for the tendon-muscle interface. Adapted and modified with permission from ref. ¹¹⁰, copyright John Wiley and Sons, 2021. d Electrospun recombinant elastin yarns, manually woven to a frame with pore sizes of 1 mm² were used for the cultivation of dermal fibroblasts. (i) Scheme of the production of elastin yarns and the final woven topography. (ii) SEM image of an elastin-yarn. (iii) Stress-strain curve of dry and hydrated tropoelastin-silk yarns at a strain rate of 100 mm/min. (iv) Merged images of F-actin staining (yellow), nuclei (blue) and the yarn (green). (v) Representative hematoxylin and eosin staining of tropoelastin-silk meshes after 8 weeks of implantation in mice. Adapted and modified with permission of ref. ⁶³, copyright Elsevier, 2019.