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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2019 Aug 28.
Published in final edited form as: Chem Soc Rev. 2018 Aug 28;47(17):6486–6504. doi: 10.1039/c8cs00187a

Figure 1. Hierarchical structure of B. mori silk.

Figure 1

(a) B. mori silk fiber has a core-shell type structure, with silk fibroin as the inner core and sericin as the outer coating. Each silk fibroin brin is composed of numerous interlocking fibroin fibrils. Inside the fibroin fibrils, the β-sheet nanocrystals are connected by amorphous chains to form a heteronanocomposite. β-sheet nanocrystals are composed of stacked β-sheets with peptide chains connected by hydrogen bonds in each sheet. The lattice constants of the orthogonal unit cell of β-sheet nanocrystal are a = 0.938 nm, b = 0.949 nm, and c = 0.698 nm for silkworm, B. mori, silk. (b) Scanning electron microscopy image of native B. mori silkworm silk (scale bar: 10 μm). (c) Atomic force microscopy image of the fibroin fibril structure in B. mori silkworm silk with a sequence of linked segments (scale bar: 100 nm). Adapted with permission from refs 7, 8 and 9. Copyright 2002 Springer Nature, 2013 Royal Society of Chemistry, and 2017 MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland.