The mussel byssus is a biorenewable, protein-based material produced by marine mussels, which has attracted the interest of material scientists because of its remarkable mechanical and self-healing properties. Large quantities of byssus waste material from mussel mariculture are produced every year, which have great potential as a raw starting material for producing sustainable advanced materials. In this work, we developed a facile and scalable method to synthesize whole byssus-based porous matrices that retain part of the hierarchical organization of the pristine material at the nanoscale. The resulting material is biocompatible and maintains important native byssus features: metal ion chelation (≥12 mg/g), collagen domains, and hierarchical organization, with tunable properties controlled via metal ion content. Furthermore, these biocompatible matrices showed a dye absorbing efficiency (up to 64 mg/g for anionic dyes) that was similar to or higher than that of the pristine byssus, a proof of preservation of structural motifs. These findings indicate that biorenewable matrices originating from byssus waste could have potential use in biomedical engineering and applied material science.

中文翻译：

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贻贝废液中的功能性生物相容性基质

贻贝是一种由海洋贻贝生产的可生物更新的，基于蛋白质的材料，由于其卓越的机械和自愈特性，吸引了材料科学家的兴趣。每年，贻贝海水养殖产生大量的废渣废料，这些废料作为生产可持续的先进原料的原材料很有潜力。在这项工作中，我们开发了一种简便且可扩展的方法来合成整个基于byssus的多孔矩阵，该矩阵在纳米级保留了原始材料的分层组织的一部分。所得材料具有生物相容性，并保持重要的自然吸收特性：金属离子螯合（≥12mg / g），胶原蛋白域和层次结构，其可调谐特性可通过金属离子含量控制。此外，这些生物相容性基质显示出的染料吸收效率（对于阴离子染料高达64 mg / g）与原始扁桃体相似或更高，证明了结构基序得以保留。这些发现表明，源自废液的生物可再生基质可能在生物医学工程和应用材料科学中具有潜在用途。