Fabrication and characterization of human hair keratin templates

• Main Author: Chia, You Hong
• Other Authors: Ng Kee Woei
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Materials
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/76752
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Keratins are major structural proteins that can be found in horns, hooves, nails and human hair. Apart from providing structural support, keratins also act as external protective layer by forming intermediate filaments. With their biocompatibility and intrinsic bioactivity, keratins have been studies intensively and have been synthesized to obtain biomaterials such as keratin films. Different polymers have been added together with keratin to improve the film properties. In this study, human hair was used as a source to extract keratins. Human hair consists of two main types of proteins: keratin intermediate filament proteins (KIFPs) and keratin-associated proteins (KAPs). Little research has been done on the interactions between KIFP and KAP. Thus, this study was carried out to extract KIFP and KAP separately from human hair. Both proteins were then mixed together at different KIFP/KAP ratios (90/10, 95/5, 99/1, 99.25/0.75, 99.5/0.5, 99.75/0.25, 100/0) and fabricated to obtain films through two different procedures: mixing of KIFP and KAP before dialysis and dialysis of KIFP and KAP separately before mixing them together. From the results, using the first procedure of mixing the proteins together before dialysis was unable to obtain the films which contained KAPs. The second procedure of dialyzing the proteins separately before mixing them together was able to obtain the films for all the different ratios. After obtaining the films, they were characterized using several characterization techniques such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), Ultraviolet-Visible Spectroscopy (UV-VIS) and Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) to observe the changes in properties of KIFP/KAP films of different ratios. From the results obtained through the characterizations, the properties KIFP/KAP films did not have significant changes within the ratios that was done in this study. This study aims to obtain keratin films by mixing KIFP and KAP in different ratios and to observe changes to the properties of the films with the different ratios, giving insights for future work.