Mesoscopic‐Functionalization of Silk Fibroin with Gold Nanoclusters Mediated by Keratin and Bioinspired Silk Synapse

Silk fibroin (SF) offers great opportunities in manufacturing biocompatible/partially biodegradable devices with environmental benignity and biomedical applications. To obtain active SF devices of next generation, this work is to demonstrate a new functionalization strategy of the mesoscopic functionalization for soft materials. Unlike the atomic functionalization of solid materials, the meso-functionalization is to incorporate meso-dopants, i.e., functional molecules or nanomaterials, quantum dots, into the mesoscopic networks of soft materials. In this work, wool keratin (WK) molecules were adopted as mediating molecules to incorporate gold nanoclusters (AuNCs), into the mesoscopic networks of SF. It follows from our analyses that the β-crystallites between WK and SF molecules establish the binding between WK@AuNCs and the SF networks. The incorporated WK@AuNCs are electron rich and serve as electronically charged nano particles to bridge the growth of Ag filaments in bio-degradable WK@AuNCs-SF memristors. The meso-functionalization can greatly enhance the performance of SF materials and endows them with new functionalities. This can be highlighted by biocompatible/partly degradable WK@AuNCs functionalized SF resistive random-access memories, having the enhanced resistive switching memory performance, and the unique synapse characteristics and the capability of synapse learning compared with neat SF devices, and of great importance in nonvolatile memory, analog circuits, and neuromorphic applications.