Page 247 - IJB-9-5

International Journal of Bioprinting

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Antheraea pernyi silk fibroin bioinks for digital

light processing 3D printing

Xue Zhang , Wenbi Wu , Yulan Huang, Xiong Yang, Maling Gou*
†
†
State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan,
China
(This article belongs to the Special Issue: 3D Bioprinting with Photocurable Bioinks)

Abstract
The application of three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting has increased in the
biomedical field. The lack of bioinks with both biocompatibility and printability is still
a problem to be solved. Silk fibroin materials have good biocompatibility and have
a broad application prospect in the field of biomedical materials. At present, most
research usually involves Bombyx mori silk fibroin (BSF). However, BSF has low cell
adhesion. Compared with BSF, Antheraea pernyi silk fibroin (ASF) isolated from typical
non-mulberry silk exhibits a unique arginine-glycine-aspartate (RGD) sequence with
good cell adhesion enhancement. In this study, we developed a bioink based on ASF
for digital light processing (DLP) 3D bioprinting. The ASF-based bioinks (ASF-MA)
were produced by a methacryloylation process using methacrylic anhydride (MA) to
achieve the properties of photopolymerization reaction. The ASF-MA hydrogel has
mechanical properties, biocompatibility, and especially cell adhesion. Meanwhile,
we found that the ASF-MA hydrogels promoted the adhesion, migration, and

† These authors contributed equally proliferation of S16 cells. Hence, the ASF-MA hydrogels had the potential applications
to this work. in biomedical fields.
*Corresponding author:
Maling Gou
(goumaling@scu.edu.cn) Keywords: Antheraea pernyi silk fibroin; Hydrogels; Photopolymerization;
Mechanical properties; Bioprinting
Citation: Zhang X, Wu W, Huang Y,
et al., 2023, Antheraea pernyi
silk fibroin bioinks for digital light
processing 3D printing.
Int J Bioprint, 9(5): 760. 1. Introduction
https://doi.org/10.18063/ijb.760
Three-dimensional (3D) printing technology was a subversive technology emerging
Received: February 9, 2023 in recent years. It has unique advantages in personalized and complex structure
Accepted: March 13, 2023
Published Online: May 24, 2023 manufacturing. Despite the increasing application of 3D bioprinting in the biomedical
field, there was still a lack of bioinks with good biocompatibility and printability. At
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s).
This is an Open Access article present, the biomaterials used for bioinks were mainly natural or synthetic polymers
distributed under the terms of the because of their biocompatibility and printability. Natural polymers were one of the
Creative Commons Attribution more desired biomaterials since they were more immune system-friendly, cheaper,
License, permitting distribution, [1-4]
and reproduction in any medium, easier to obtain, and more biodegradable than synthetic polymers . Currently, the
provided the original work is most commonly used photopolymerized printing inks were protein, polysaccharide,
properly cited. and synthetic biomaterials, and most of them were modified chemically with
Publisher’s Note: Whioce photoreactive functional groups, such as gelatin-methacryloyl (GelMA), Bombyx mori
Publishing remains neutral with silk fibroin-glycidyl methacrylate (BSF-GMA), thiol-ene gelatin, methacrylate-based
regard to jurisdictional claims in hyaluronic acid, sodium alginate, and polyethylene glycol diacrylate (PEGDA) [5,6] .
published maps and institutional
affiliations. Silk fibroin is a type of protein extracted mostly from silkworms that is one of the

Volume 9 Issue 5 (2023) 239 https://doi.org/10.18063/ijb.760