Dec. 27, 2012 ? Tufts University School of Engineering researchers have grown a novel routine for fabricating collagen structures that maintains a collagen’s healthy strength and fiber structure, creation it useful for a series of biomedical applications.
Collagen, a many abounding protein in a body, is widely used to build scaffolds for hankie engineering since it is biocompatible and biodegradable. Collagen is, however, tough to work with in a healthy form since it is mostly insoluble in water, and common estimate techniques revoke a strength and interrupt a sinewy structure.
The Tufts engineers’ new technique, called bioskiving, creates collagen structures from skinny sheets of decellularized tendon built with swapping fiber directions that say most of collagen’s healthy strength.
Bioskiving does not intermix collagen’s healthy properties, says Qiaobing Xu, partner highbrow of biomedical engineering, and contriver of a new technique. “Our routine leverages collagen’s local attributes to take advantage of a well-organized micro/nanostructures that inlet already provides,” he says.
Xu and Kyle Alberti, a Ph.D. tyro in Xu’s lab, report their record in a paper published online in Advanced Healthcare Materials on Dec 12, 2012.
Slice, Stack, and Roll
In their research, Xu and Albert cut tiny sections of collagen from cow tendons. Using a specialized detergent, a researchers decellularized a sections, withdrawal total usually a extracellular collagen pattern done of bundles of aligned collagen nanofibers.
Xu and Alberti sliced a sections into ultra-thin sheets regulating a microtome, and afterwards built 10 slices, crisscrossing a sheets so that a fibers in one ran perpendicular to those above and next it. This routine constructed a skeleton element with tensile strength stronger than constructs done regulating common estimate techniques, Xu notes.
The researchers also combined tubular scaffolding by rolling layers of collagen sheets around Teflon-coated potion rods. The sheets were layered so that fibers ran along a length and a rim of a rods. This routine yielded tubes that were found to be stronger than identical tubes done of reconstituted collagen. They also confirmed their rarely aligned fiber structure.
“Alignment gives a skeleton a ability to beam a instruction and course of dungeon growth,” says Xu, who also has a expertise appointment during Tufts School of Medicine, “This capability is profitable for hankie engineering applications where biocompatibility and a ability to beam unidirectional haughtiness expansion are both desired, such as prosthetic or hankie engineering-based blood vessels or haughtiness conduits.”
The work was upheld by appropriation from a Tufts Faculty Research Award, a Charlton Award from Tufts School of Medicine, and a Tufts Neuroscience Institute Pilot Grant. It employed comforts during a Harvard University Center for Nanoscale Systems(CNS), a member of a National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), that is upheld by a National Science Foundation underneath NSF endowment no. ECS-0335765.
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Journal Reference:
- Kyle A. Alberti, Qiaobing Xu. Slicing, Stacking and Rolling: Fabrication of Nanostructured Collagen Constructs from Tendon Sections. Advanced Healthcare Materials, 2012; DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201200319
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