Data for manuscript entitled "Silk-Nano-Fibroin Aerogels: A Bio-Derived, Amine-Rich Platform for Rapid and Reversible CO2 Capture"

In this work, we report the development of self-supporting CO2 sorbents derived from natural silk fibroin. Solid sorbents are critical to emerging carbon-capture technologies, especially for direct-air and post-combustion capture. While amine-functionalized porous materials such as MOFs, COFs, zeolites, and carbon frameworks exhibit high CO2 uptake, their synthesis complexity, high regeneration temperatures, and limited cyclic stability hinder practical deployment.Here, we demonstrate that silk fibroin—a natural blend of amino acids (glycine, alanine, serine, tyrosine, valine, threonine, etc.)—can be transformed into high-surface-area, free-standing aerogels obtained directly from Bombyx mori cocoons. Without external scaffolds or chemical modification, the silk-nano-fibroin aerogels achieve CO2-adsorption capacities of ~1 mmol g⁻¹ at 25 °C and 1 atm, rapid adsorption–desorption kinetics, complete regeneration at 60 °C, and full retention of capacity under humid conditions. Thermogravimetric analysis confirms stability up to ≈ 250 °C, while XPS, Raman, FTIR, and solid-state 13C NMR collectively verify amine-assisted chemisorption. These files contain all the figure data (except the FESEM, AFM, and optical images, which are available in the manuscript) used for the analysis in this manuscript.