Microencapsulation of High‐Content Actives Using Biodegradable Silk Materials
Name
Small - 2022 - Liu - Microencapsulation of High‐Content Actives Using Biodegradable Silk Materials.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.07 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
8e070656a6713eeca6a1175616b0debe
Author(s)
Liu, Muchun
Millard, Pierre‐Eric
Urch, Henning
Zeyons, Ophelie
Findley, Douglas
Konradi, Rupert
Marelli, Benedetto
Date Issued
August 2022
Journal
Small
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Liu, Muchun, Millard, Pierre‐Eric, Urch, Henning, Zeyons, Ophelie, Findley, Douglas et al. 2022. "Microencapsulation of High‐Content Actives Using Biodegradable Silk Materials." Small, 18 (31).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
There is a compelling need across several industries to substitute non-degradable, intentionally added microplastics with biodegradable alternatives. Nonetheless, stringent performance criteria in actives' controlled release and manufacturing at scale of emerging materials hinder the replacement of polymers used for microplastics fabrication with circular ones. Here, the authors demonstrate that active microencapsulation in a structural protein such as silk fibroin can be achieved by modulating protein protonation and chain relaxation at the point of material assembly. Silk fibroin micelles' size is tuned from several to hundreds of nanometers, enabling the manufacturing-by retrofitting spray drying and spray freeze drying techniques-of microcapsules with tunable morphology and structure, that is, hollow-spongy, hollow-smooth, hollow crumpled matrices, and hollow crumpled multi-domain. Microcapsules degradation kinetics and sustained release of soluble and insoluble payloads typically used in cosmetic and agriculture applications are controlled by modulating fibroin's beta-sheet content from 20% to near 40%. Ultraviolet-visible studies indicate that burst release of a commonly used herbicide (i.e., saflufenacil) significantly decreases from 25% to 0.8% via silk fibroin microencapsulation. As a proof-of-concept for agrochemicals applications, a 6-day greenhouse trial demonstrates that saflufenacil delivered on corn plants via silk microcapsules reduces crop injury when compared to the non-encapsulated version.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/smll.202201487
