Premium VIOSILQ Cocoons 

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VIOSILQ grows high-quality mulberry leaves directly in the fertile lands of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand, and in cooperation with the Thai Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, we raise silkworms together with farmers and produce high-quality silkworm cocoons. We produce cocoons all year round using white and golden silkworms.

Along with cocoons, we also produce fibroin fibers, sericin peptides, and especially raw silk non-woven fabrics produced directly by silkworms all year round.

VIOSILQ is ready to supply premium quality products that customers want and can develop new products through collaboration with customers.

Application of Silkworm Cocoon Materials in Various Fields

Silkworm cocoons are used in various fields such as nonwoven fabrics, silk fibers, smart fibers, medicines, health foods, secondary batteries, tissue engineering and polymers (artificial eardrums, artificial bones, artificial teeth, artificial retinas, artificial hearts), drug carriers, surgical threads, eco-friendly plastics, food preservation agents, wearable electronics, bedding, decorations, etc.

Sericulture Industry

Sericulture is an agricultural-based industry that cultivates silk to raise silkworms. The primary purpose of silkworms is to produce silk, which is economically important. The demand for natural silk is increasing worldwide. Silk is a high-value-added but small-scale product, accounting for only 0.2% of the world's total fiber production, and the world's silk production is 609,332 tons per year.

Structure of Silkworm Cocoons (Fibroin and Sericin)

Mature silkworms squeeze viscous fluid from two large glands in their bodies to make cocoons. This solution is extruded through two tubes in the silkworm head into a common spinneret. The viscous part (fibroin) is covered with another secretion (sericin) that flows from two other symmetrically arranged glands. These two components are released into the air and coagulate, forming a solid continuous filament, which is glued together. As a result of this spinning process, the fiber has two main parts: sericin and fibroin.

Physical and Chemical Properties

The silkworm cocoon is physically eco-friendly, very transparent, and has a well-organized structure. The silk filaments are about 900–1700 m long and 9–11 microns in diameter. The tensile properties of the silk fibers are stronger than those of steel filaments of the same diameter. The specific gravity of raw cultivated silk and raw throwing silk is 1.33 and 1.32 g.cm³, respectively. Silk fibers heated at 140°C are not affected for a long time and decompose quickly at 175°C. The strength and elongation of silk fibroin fibers decrease when the fibers are exposed to UV light. In terms of chemical properties, silk is insoluble in water at room temperature, but silk can lose weight when boiled at 100°C. Acids and alkalis can hydrolyze the polypeptide chains of the fibers.

Mechanical Properties

Silk has attracted extensive attention due to its excellent material properties and promising applications. Silkworm silk has been reported to have an excellent balance of strength (610–690 MPa) and toughness (70–78 MJ m⁻³ ), making it stronger than other biomaterials except spider silk and competitive with synthetic fibers. Natural silkworm silk is a novel alternative reinforcing material for engineering composites and exhibits excellent strength and toughness under ambient and cryogenic conditions due to its elastic-plastic deformation mechanism. The mechanical properties and reinforcing mechanisms of silk and silk fiber-reinforced polymer composites (SFRPs) are important for material design and applications.

Applications of Silk Materials

Bombyx mori silk has attracted extensive attention due to its natural mass production, excellent biocompatibility, and unique mechanical properties. Silkworm silk has been used extensively in textiles for thousands of years due to its glossy appearance, flexibility, and lightweight. Bombyx mori protein fibers are composite materials consisting of a semi-crystalline silk core, mainly silk fibroin, which is responsible for load-bearing capacity, and an outer layer of sericin, which acts as a saponifying agent. Fibroin imparts biocompatibility to fibroin, while sericin is digestible due to its protein properties and its propensity for the action of proteolytic enzymes present in the body. These properties make it biocompatible and biodegradable. Additional properties such as gelling ability, water retention capacity, and skin adhesion make it a widely used material in the medical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic fields.

Silk as a Biomedical Material

Recently, there has been increasing interest in silk materials for biomedical applications such as biocompatibility, biodegradability, and self-assembly for unique physical, chemical, and mechanical properties. The smaller silk units, called fibroin fibers, have identical repeating amino acid sequences, which influence the protein chain structure and the properties of the silk material. These interesting properties of silk have significant biomedical applications.

Bombyx mori silk fibroin proteins can be subdivided into very large, light (≈26 kDa), and heavy (≈391 kDa) chains, which are linked by a single disulfide bond, and are used in medical applications. However, the very hydrophobic amino acids and antioxidant potential of sericin have applications in food and cosmetics. In the presence of moisture, silk can act as a therapeutic agent for wound healing, cell proliferation stimulation, UV protection, and in cream and shampoo formulations. The antioxidant activity associated with sericin's low digestibility increases its medicinal uses, such as antitumor, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory, anticoagulant, and colon health. Silk performance biocompatibility and biodegradability, use of silk in sutures, surgical meshes, and fabrics, clinical trials such as wound healing, tissue engineering, and novel biomedical applications such as silk solutions, films, scaffolds, electrospun materials, hydrogels, and particles. Extensive research in the field of tissue engineering on silk and silk regenerative properties is related to the impressive mechanical strength of silk. Based on these remarkable properties of silk such as high mechanical strength, biocompatibility, and degradability, it is used in the fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

The mechanical stability of scaffolds is essential for cells to attach, expand, divide, proliferate, and differentiate. Connective tissues such as tendons, ligaments, bones, and cartilage are also used. Furthermore, scaffolds have shown remarkable biocompatibility characteristics and are used as nanoscale structures for cell recognition and response. As a result, nanofibers are the most suitable form of artificial matrix to be considered in tissue engineering technology.

Electrical and Optical Devices

The electrical properties as a function of temperature and humidity have found applications in battery technology, biosensors, humidity sensors, steam engines, and waste heat management. Metal salts such as FeCl3 and ZnCl2 are derived from natural silk and act as effective activating-graphitizing agents during the dissolution process. In addition to hierarchical porous nitrogen-doped carbon nanosheets and electronic device applications, silk materials have shown great potential in optical applications due to their unique optical properties and diverse nanopatterned structures. Silk fibroin has also been used in various optical devices such as diffractive optical elements (DOEs) and light-emitting diode (LED) lenses. DOEs are attractive for labeled or unlabeled biosensing because their diffraction efficiency is easily influenced by chemical or biological molecules attached to them. Recently, fluorescent silk has attracted tremendous attention due to its potential in cell visualization and scaffold performance monitoring as a novel functionally modified natural biomaterial. Advances in genetic engineering have enabled the ability to produce fluorescent silks in various colors such as red, green, and orange.

Future Trends in Silk

Technologies that apply natural silk include the Internet of Things (IoT), enhanced wireless personal area network (WPAN) systems, image processing technologies and smart sensors, biosensor technologies, public-private partnerships (PPPs), establishment of silkworm banks, and sericulture startups.

Product production

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