Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2016 May 6;6:25263. doi: 10.1038/srep25263

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

Copyright © 2016, Macmillan Publishers Limited

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

PMC Copyright notice

(a) Time-lapse of strawberries ripening. As picked strawberries were stored at 22 °C and 38% RH (no coating) or dip coated in silk fibroin suspension (23% beta-sheets coating). Water annealing was used as post-process to modulate the relative content of beta-sheets in silk fibroin. At day 7, silk fibroin coating showed to improve the quality of the stored strawberries. (b) Weight loss of strawberries stored for up to 14 days at 22 °C and 38% RH. Strawberries were stored as picked (i.e. no coating) or after coating with silk fibroin suspension (Dx-xx%). Dx stands for ‘x’ dip coating steps. xx% stands for relative amount of beta-sheet content. (e.g. D1-23% means that strawberries were dip coated with silk fibroin materials with 23% beta-sheets content). One-way ANOVA test with Tukey mean analysis was used to evaluate the weight loss data. Silk beta-sheet content (which is proportional to water-annealing time) but not number of dip coating steps affected the dehydration of the strawberries considered. No coating controls lost circa 70 wt% of their original weights in the 14 days considered (highlighted within the red rectangles). Strawberries coated silk fibroin retained more water than the no coating controls at day 3 (p <D 0.05). An increase in silk fibroin beta-sheets content via water annealing process further decreased fruit dehydration compared to non-water annealed counterparts (p <D 0.05) and to the no coating controls (p <D 0.05) but no statistically significant difference was found between samples with a beta-sheet content ≥D 36% (p >D 0.05).