Biomimetic spinning of silk fibers and in situ cell encapsulation

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In situ embedding of sensitive materials (e.g., cells and proteins) in silk fibers without damage presents a significant challenge due to the lack of mild and efficient methods. Here, we report the development of a microfluidic chip-based method for preparation of meter-long silk fibroin (SF) hydrogel fibers by mimicking the silkworm-spinning process. For the spinning of SF fibers, alginate was used as a sericin-like material to induce SF phase separation and entrap liquid SFs, making it possible to shape the outline of SF-based fibers under mild physicochemical conditions. L929 fibroblasts were encapsulated in the fibric hydrogel and displayed excellent viability. Cell-laden SF fibric hydrogels prepared using our method offer a new type of SF-based biomedical device with potential utility in biomedicine.