Tunable Macroscopic Alignment of Self-Assembling Peptide Nanofibers.

ABSTRACT: Fibrous proteins that comprise the extracellular matrix (ECM) guide cellular growth and tissue organization. A lack of synthetic strategies able to generate aligned, ECM-mimetic biomaterials has hampered bottom-up tissue engineering of anisotropic tissues and led to a limited understanding of cell-matrix interactions. Here, we present a facile extrusion-based fabrication method to produce anisotropic, nanofibrous hydrogels using self-assembling peptides. The application of shear force coinciding with ion-triggered gelation is used to kinetically trap supramolecular nanofibers into aligned, hierarchical structures. We establish how modest changes in phosphate buffer concentration during peptide self-assembly can be used to tune their alignment and packing. In addition, increases in the nano

SUBMITTER: Farsheed AC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10862821 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature