NANOTECHNOLOGY AND 3D BIOPRINTING FOR NEURAL TISSUE REGENERATION - 3D Bioprinting and Nanotechnology in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine - page 301

FIGURE 14.1
(A) Schematic illustration of an ideal tissue-engineered neural scaffold. (B) Schematic illustration of tissue-engineered
neural scaffolds for nerve repair. In particular, the left image in (B) represents electrospun random or highly aligned scaf-
folds for repairing peripheral nerve transection and spinal cord injuries. The right image in (B) represents hydrogel
scaffolds for healing spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries. Images (B) are adopted from Saracino et al. (2013) .
14.2 NANOTECHNOLOGY FOR NEURAL TISSUE REGENERATION
14.2.1 SELF-ASSEMBLING NANOBIOMATERIALS
Self-assembly is a process wherein individual biological components (including viruses, peptides, pro-
teins, and RNA and DNA complexes) organize spontaneously into nanostructures, including nanofi-
bers, nanotubes, vesicles, helical ribbons, and b -sheets ( Hosseinkhani et al., 2013; Ko et al., 2010;
Smith et al., 2011; Yang et al., 2013b; Zhang et al., 2008 ). Self-assembling dynamics can be read-