Silk-Based Materials and Composites

Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to announce the opening of a new Special Issue in the Applied Sciences Journal.

Nature can offer an endless source of inspiration for creating new materials that respond to the high ecological, economic, and technical demands of our actual society. The scientific community should have an important role in seeking more efficient, reliable, multifunctional, recyclable, environmentally friendly, and less energy-consuming materials.

Silk is a commonly available natural biopolymer produced in specialized glands of arthropods. With a long history of use in textile, silk has been progressively employed in advanced applications with increasing complexity and multifunctionality. The exceptional intrinsic properties of silk, such as self-assembly, machinability, biocompatibility, biodegradation or nontoxicity, open a wide range of exciting applications. These have resulted in the use of silk not only for the development of advanced materials, but also as a template for the development of genetically engineered silk-based protein polymers. The formulation of composites comprising active fillers and silk-based materials further expands the potential range of applications, opening new perspectives in the development of a new generation of multifunctional biocomposites.

The present Special Issue on “Silk-Based Materials and Composites” aims to cover all aspects of silk-derived materials and composites that contribute to expand the knowledge around silk and push forward its potential range of applications. The topics covered by this Special Issue include but are not exclusively limited to: silk extraction from natural sources, design and formulation of silk-based materials and composites including those of recombinant origin, modification/functionalization, processing and characterization, and experimental validation.

We hope you will contribute your high-quality research, and we look forward to reading your valuable results.

Dr. Raul Machado
Dr. Rui F. P. Pereira
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.