Indirect cytotoxicity evaluations of antibacterial raw silk fabric doped with calcium, copper and zinc on fibroblasts and osteoblasts

Antibacterial materials are widely used to prevent hospital-acquired infections. In our previous report, metal (calcium, copper or zinc)-doped raw silk fabrics were shown to possess strong antibacterial activities against Escherichia coli. However, antibacterial materials may occasionally be harmful to the human body; thus, in this study, we investigated the cytotoxicities of extracts from metal-doped raw silk fabrics with respect to fibroblasts and osteoblasts indirectly. Calcium-doped raw silk fabric demonstrated cytocompatibility with fibroblasts. Contrarily, copper- and zinc-doped raw silk fabrics remarkably decreased the cell densities of fibroblasts, indicating their cytotoxic effects. This observation could be attributed to the high concentrations of the released copper or zinc ions. However, calcium-, copper- and zinc-doped raw silk fabrics did not demonstrate any cytotoxic effects on osteoblasts because a high concentration of the serum alleviated the effects of these metal ions released from the fabrics. Thus, calcium-doped raw silk fabric is a promising antibacterial material that does not induce strong cytotoxicity. This study will facilitate the design of materials that are both antibacterial and safe.

Actinomycin X2, an Antimicrobial Depsipeptide from Marine-Derived Streptomyces cyaneofuscatus Applied as a Good Natural Dye for Silk Fabric

Actinomycins as clinical medicine have been extensively studied, while few investigations were conducted to discover the feasibility of actinomycins as antimicrobial natural dye contributing to the medical value of the functional fabrics. This study was focused on the application of actinomycin X2 (Ac.X2), a peptide pigment cultured from marine-derived Streptomyces cyaneofuscatus, in the dyeing and finishing of silk fabric. The dyeing potential of Ac.X2 with silk vs. cotton fabrics was assessed. As a result, the silk fabric exhibited greater uptake and color fastness with Ac.X2. Through Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses, some changes of chemical property for the dyed fabric and Ac.X2 were studied. The silk fabric dyed with Ac.X2 exhibited good UV protection ability. The antibacterial properties of dyed and finished silk were also evaluated, which exhibited over 90% antibacterial activity even after 20 washing cycles. In addition, the brine shrimp assay was conducted to evaluate the general toxicity of the tested fabric, and the results indicated that the dyed silk fabrics had a good biological safety property.

Analysis of Enervation Conduct of Indian Maddar Natural Dye on Silk Fabric

Dying is a popular practice in textile industry which is prevalent at all parts of the world from the period of ancient civilization. Initially, natural dyes i.e. dye derived from natural resources like vegetables, flowers, minerals, plants etc. were used. Now-a-days, due to technological and scientific innovations synthetic dyes are processed at large scale in the laboratories as it is still one of the most profitable industry globally. However, the rapid utilization of chemicals in textile industry for production of synthetic dyes causes degradation of environment like soil pollution, water pollution etc. Hence, it is necessary to promote the utilization of natural dyes globally. In this paper, the bleached silk fabric was dyed with Indian Madder natural dye at different temperature and the colour strength is measured spectrophotometrically in order to study the effectiveness of the dye. Keywords: Natural dye, bleached silk fabric, Indian Madder, Colour strength

Generic Wrapper Based Model using Haralick Features for Silk Fabric Defect Classification

Quality control unit of fabric industry looks for the effective defect detection methodology. The research is required to be done in this area to develop such solution. Various models based on combination of suitable feature extraction, selection and classification approaches need to be experimented out for the same. This paper attempts to experiment and provide such models mainly based on generic wrapper based selection approaches. Widely used broader range of Haralick features are prominently used for detection and classification of defects in this research. It also attempts to identify the suitability of these features based on segmented images provided as an input. The research has been carried on TILDA Dataset consisting of 800 Silk Fabric Images with eight different defects present on it and each carrying 100 images per defect. Models generated using generic wrapper based approach has also been compared with the Gabor Transforms. Then identification of suitable Haralick Features for particular type of defects has been carried out. In this 68% classification accuracy has been achieved using generic wrapper method and 40 % accuracy has been achieved using Gabor Transform with respect to fourteen Haralick Features and seven types of defects.