Molecular crowding of collagen: a pathway to produce highly-organized collagenous structures.

ABSTRACT: Collagen in vertebrate animals is often arranged in alternating lamellae or in bundles of aligned fibrils which are designed to withstand in vivo mechanical loads. The formation of these organized structures is thought to result from a complex, large-area integration of individual cell motion and locally-controlled synthesis of fibrillar arrays via cell-surface fibripositors (direct matrix printing). The difficulty of reproducing such a process in vitro has prevented tissue engineers from constructing clinically useful load-bearing connective tissue directly from collagen. However, we and others have taken the view that long-range organizational information is potentially encoded into the structure of the collagen molecule itself, allowing the control of fibril organization to extend far f

SUBMITTER: Saeidi N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3757096 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature