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Alignment of human vascular smooth muscle cells on parallel electrospun synthetic elastin fibers
Author(s) -
NivisonSmith Lisa,
Weiss Anthony S.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal of biomedical materials research part a
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.849
H-Index - 150
eISSN - 1552-4965
pISSN - 1549-3296
DOI - 10.1002/jbm.a.33255
Subject(s) - materials science , elastin , electrospinning , composite material , smooth muscle , biomedical engineering , nanotechnology , polymer , pathology , medicine
We generated parallel elastic fibers from synthetic elastin (SE) as a model of the arterial media and assessed the alignment of smooth muscle cells (SMCs). SE utilized crosslinked electrospun human tropoelastin to form aligned fibers that mimicked the topography and elastin‐rich content of the medial extracellular matrix. Bundled parallel fibers were anisotropically more elastic than randomly arranged scaffolds (111 ± 25 kPa vs. 265 ± 17 kPa) in the direction of the fibers. Aligned and random fiber scaffolds each supported SMC growth. Following attachment, SMCs proliferated longitudinally on the parallel fibers and expressed native α‐smooth muscle actin. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part A, 2012.