Can Thiourea Dioxide Regenerate Keratin from Waste Wool?

ABSTRACT

Wool is a natural biopolymer with excellent biocompatibility. This dense structure makes it difficult to recycle the millions of wool textiles discarded annually. This study reports, for the first time, the regeneration of keratin using thiourea dioxide. Disulfide bonds were cleavage from the result of Raman test. FTIR, XRD and ¹³C-NMR tests determined that regenerated wool keratin retained protein macromolecule backbone, though the crystallinity degree and α-helix structure content decreased slightly. SDS-PAGE results demonstrated that the process contributed to an increase of low molecular weight keratin. All the results in this study indicate that thiourea dioxide is an effective solvent for the regeneration of wool keratin. The study offers a novel approach for the regeneration and recycle of other natural protein-based material.

摘要

羊毛是一种具有良好生物相容性的天然生物聚合物. 这种密集的结构使得每年丢弃的数百万羊毛织物难以回收利用. 这项研究报告，第一次，再生角蛋白使用二氧化硫脲. 拉曼光谱测试结果显示二硫键断裂. FTIR、XRD和13C-NMR测试表明，再生羊毛角蛋白保留了蛋白质大分子骨架，但结晶度和α-螺旋结构含量略有下降. SDS-PAGE结果表明，该过程有助于低分子量角蛋白的增加. 研究结果表明，二氧化硫脲是羊毛角蛋白再生的有效溶剂. 该研究为其它天然蛋白质基材料的再生和循环利用提供了一条新的途径.

KEYWORDS:

• Wool keratin
• Regeneration
• Thiourea dioxide

Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51673087); National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB0309200); Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (KYCX20_1784).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [51673087]; National Key R&D Program of China [2017YFB0309200]; Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province [KYCX20_1784].