Extracting keratin from wool by using l-cysteine

Abstract

In this work, l-cysteine was applied to the dissolution of wool keratin as a reducing agent. The dissolution time was 5 h at 75 °C, with 72% dissolubility. XRD, ATR-FTIR and ¹³C NMR showed that the content of α-helix structures in regenerated wool keratin was decreased compared with natural wool. The content of S–S crosslinkages for regenerated wool keratin significantly decreased and broke about 62% of the S–S crosslinkages in the natural wool, as observed from Raman spectra.