Front Cover: Towards Non‐stick Silk: Tuning the Hydrophobicity of Silk Fibroin Protein (ChemBioChem 22/2022)

Weaving a tunable hydrophobic web! Silk fibroin, a protein extracted from the silkworm cocoon can be tailored to possess different properties by means of chemical functionalization. In this study, we sought to induce hydrophobicity using fluorination. Fluorocarbon-appending iodonium salts accomplish the fluorination in one step. A trend of increasing hydrophobicity with the number of fluorine atoms was observed, with the most hydrophobic material exhibiting a water contact angle greater than that of Teflon! This work shows the first development of directly modified silk fibroin to create hydrophobic films. More information can be found in the Research Article by L. M. Davis, D. L. Kaplan, K. Kumar et al.