Abstract
Liquid crystals (LCs) are appealing biomaterials for applications in bone regenerative medicine due to their tunable physical properties and anisotropic viscoelastic behavior. This study reports a novel composite poly (L-lactide) (PLLA) scaffold that is manufactured by a simple electrospinning and biomineralization technique that precisely controls the fibrous structure in liquid LC phase. The enriched-LC composites have superior mineralization ability than neat PLLA; furthermore BMSC cells were inoculated onto the HAP-PLLA/LC with hydroxyapatite (HAP) composite scaffold to test the capability for osteogenesis in vitro. The results show that the PLLA/LC with HAP produced by mineralization leads to better cell compatibility, which is beneficial to cell proliferation, osteogenic differentiation, and expression of the angiogenic CD31 gene. Moreover, in vivo studies showed that the HAP-PLLA/LC scaffold with a bone-like environment significantly accelerates new and mature lamellar bone formation by development of a microenvironment for vascularized bone regeneration. Thus, this bionic composite scaffold in an LC state combining osteogenesis with vascularized activities is a promising biomaterial for bone regeneration in defective areas.
Highlights
Liquid crystals (LCs) are ubiquitous in our daily lives (Palffy-Muhoray, 2007) and are intrinsically linked to many biological processes (Rey, 2010)
The above resonances at 4.98 and 5.80 ppm disappeared, and a new peak in siloxane backbone at about 0.21 ppm appeared in the curve for P-UChol, and the characteristic peak of monomer appears in polymer at the same time, which indicates the formation of the polymer LC
The results show that HAP-PLLA/LC is a potential candidate for bone repair and regeneration processes in vivo
Summary
Liquid crystals (LCs) are ubiquitous in our daily lives (Palffy-Muhoray, 2007) and are intrinsically linked to many biological processes (Rey, 2010). Simultaneous cholesteric phase LC is the most common LC tissue in living organisms (Mitov, 2017). The surface of the cell membrane, which often is in contact with blood, is in a state of a flowing lipid LC because this type of anisotropic viscoelastic material may be a soft elastic solid, which makes the LC potentially useful for engineering the interfaces of living cells (Lockwood et al, 2006). Various ordered structures in living tissue are analogs of those in the LC phase, involving a variety of biological functions (Satiat-Jeunemaitre, 1992; Charvolin and Sadoc, 2012). LC materials have potential applications in the biological field because they can form selfassembled structures through specific interactions of noncovalent bonds, making them compatible
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