Keratin has been attracting interest due to its stability against enzymatic degradation thereby allowing more predictable degradation profile for tissue regeneration applications. While the efficacy of keratin has been demonstrated in different tissue models, there has been no systematic study to investigate and compare the different routes of keratin extraction from human hair. Here, we compared the four commonly used extraction methods and highlighted both physical and chemical differences in the extracted keratin. Keratin was extracted from human hair using one of four common agents, namely, sodium sulfide, peracetic acid, urea and thioglycolic acid. Whereas no specific trend was observed, the keratin extracted through peracetic acid method had significantly different properties. It resulted in lowest yield of 52 μg/mL and low crystallinity but the protein formed aggregates with highest hydrodynamic average size of around 283 nm compared to the other three methods. However, despite greater aggregation, keratin extracted from peracetic acid method exhibited secondary structural conformation similar to thioglycolic acid method. All the four extracted keratin promoted cellular proliferation of osteoblasts compared to the uncoated surface. These results provide new insight into the extraction of keratin from human hair with implications for its use as a biomaterial. We found differences statistically significant on the binding affinity of peptides based on their content of cysteine, hydrophobic and polar amino acids, mainly containing alcohols. These results point to the formation of hydrophobic interactions and disulfide bonds between small peptides and human hair keratins as the main driving forces for the interaction of possible cosmetic peptides, namely designed to strength human hair. As so, our results enlighten the nature of the interaction of keratin based materials with human hair, which are claimed to enhance hair fiber strength, and enable a more directed and sustained hair care peptide design.

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Sandra Jones                               

Journal Manager

Hair Therapy and Transplantation

Email: hairtherapy@emedscholar.com