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After thousands of years as a highly valuable commodity, silk continues to surprise. Now it may help usher in a whole new direction for microelectronics and computing.

While silk protein has been deployed in designer electronics, its use is currently limited in part because silk fibers are a messy tangle of spaghetti-like strands.

Now, a research team led by scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has tamed the tangle. They report in the journal Science Advances that they have achieved a uniform two-dimensional (2D) layer of silk protein fragments, or "fibroins," on graphene, a carbon-based material useful for its excellent electrical conductivity.

"These results provide a reproducible method for silk protein self-assembly that is essential for designing and fabricating silk-based electronics," said Chenyang Shi, the study's lead author. "It's important to note that this system is nontoxic and water-based, which is crucial for biocompatibility."

This combination of materials—silk-on-graphene—could form a sensitive, tunable transistor highly desired by the microelectronics industry for wearable and implantable health sensors. The PNNL team also sees potential for their use as a key component of memory transistors or "memristors," in computing neural networks. Memristors, used in neural networks, allow computers to mimic how the human brain functions.

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