Silk–elastin block copolymers
have such physical and biological
properties that make them attractive biomaterials for applications
ranging from tissue regeneration to drug delivery. Silk–elastin
block copolymers that only assemble into fibrils at high concentrations
can be used for a template-induced fibril assembly. This can be achieved
by additionally including template-binding blocks that promote high
local concentrations of polymers on the template, leading to a template-induced
fibril assembly. We hypothesize that template-inducible silk-fibril
formation, and hence high critical concentrations for fibril formation,
requires careful tuning of the block lengths, to be close to a critical
set of block lengths that separates fibril forming from nonfibril
forming polymer architectures. Therefore, we explore herein the impact
of tuning block lengths for silk–elastin diblock polypeptides
on fibril formation. For silk–elastin diblocks E
S
m
–S
Q
n
, in which the elastin pentamer repeat is E
S
=
GSGVP and the crystallizable silk octamer repeat is S
Q
=
GAGAGAGQ, we find that no fibril formation occurs for
n
= 6 but that the
n
= 10 and 14 diblocks do show
concentration-dependent fibril formation. For
n
=
14 diblocks, no effect is observed of the length
m
(with
m
= 40, 60, 80) of the amorphous block on
the lengths of the fibrils. In contrast, for the
n
= 10 diblocks that are closest to the critical boundary for fibril
formation, we find that long amorphous blocks (
m
=
80) oppose the growth of fibrils at low concentrations, making them
suitable for engineering template-inducible fibril formation.