Phys.org  September 18, 2024 A team of researchers in the US (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Washington, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, North Carolina State University) developed highly ordered two-dimensional silk fibroin (SF) films grown epitaxially on van der Waals (vdW) substrates. They showed that the films consisted of lamellae of SF molecules that exhibited the same secondary structure as the nanocrystallites of native silk. Increasing the SF concentration resulted in multilayers that grew either by direct assembly of SF molecules into the lamellae or, at high concentrations, along a two-step pathway beginning with a disordered monolayer that crystallizes. They […]