Abstract
Tissues in the body are hierarchically structured composite materials with tissue-specific properties. Urea self-assembles via hydrogen bonding interactions into crystalline supracolloidal assemblies that can be used to impart macroscopic pores to polymer-based tissue scaffolds. In this communication, we explain the solvent interactions governing the solubility of urea and thereby the scope of compatible polymers. We also highlight the role of solvent interactions on the morphology of the resulting supracolloidal crystals. We elucidate the role of polymer-urea interactions on the morphology of the pores in the resulting biomaterials. Finally, we demonstrate that it is possible to use our urea templating methodology to prepare Bombyx mori silk protein-based biomaterials with pores that human dermal fibroblasts respond to by aligning with the long axis of the pores. This methodology has potential for application in a variety of different tissue engineering niches in which cell alignment is observed, including skin, bone, muscle and nerve.
Highlights
Tissues are hierarchically structured composite materials with tissue-specific properties that act as cues that dictate the behavior of cells that inhabit them, and such properties can potentially be engineered into instructional tissue scaffolds to achieve similar results [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Porous biomaterials are widely used in drug delivery and tissue engineering. 3D printing technologies are very promising for the preparation of porous biomaterials, they tend to be expensive
We expand our studies on the use of sacrificial supracolloidal templates for the generation of porous biomaterials
Summary
Tissues are hierarchically structured composite materials with tissue-specific properties that act as cues that dictate the behavior of cells that inhabit them, and such properties can potentially be engineered into instructional tissue scaffolds to achieve similar results [1,2,3,4,5,6]. We reported a simple scalable methodology for aligning the supracolloidal crystals that allows the generation of pores that were aligned over length scales of multiple centimeters within which Schwann cells from the peripheral nervous system aligned [18]. In this communication, we explain the solvent interactions governing the solubility of urea which enables us to expand the range of solvents compatible with our urea-based supracolloidal crystal. We demonstrate that it is possible to use our urea templating methodology to prepare silk protein-based biomaterials with aligned pores that permit cell growth and alignment (Figure 1)
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