Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 1
A variety of tissue cells cultured on the designer self-assembling
peptide nanofi ber scaffolds
Chicken embryo fi broblast Bovine calf and adult chondrocytes
Mouse fi broblast Bovine endothelial cells
Mouse embryonic stem cells Mouse adult neural stem cells
Mouse cerebellum granule cells Mouse and rat hippocampal cells
Mouse mesenchymal stem cells Mouse cardiac myocytes
Rat adult liver progenitor cells Rat liver hepatocytes
Rat pheochromocytoma Rat cardiac myocytes
Rat neural stem cells Rat hippocampal neural tissue slice
Bovine osteoblasts Bovine endothelium cells
Chinese hamster ovary Hamster pancreas cells
Horse bone marrow Rat keratinocytes
Human cervical carcinoma Human osteosarcoma
Human hepato-cellular carcinoma Human neuroblastoma
Human embryonic kidney Human Hodgkin's lymphoma
Human epidermal keratinocytes Human foreskin fi broblast
Human neural stem cells Human aortic endothelial cells
Note
: These cells include stable cell lines, primary isolated cells from animals,
progenitor and adult stem cells. These cells are known to be cultured in various
laboratories. Since this compilation, the peptide scaffolds have been commer-
cialized and many more cell types may have been cultured on them
systems. The next step is to directly couple biologically active and functional
peptide motifs to generate the second generation of designer scaffolds that would
signifi cantly improve their interactions with cells and tissues.
The simplest way to incorporate the functional motifs is to directly synthesize them
by extending the motifs on to the self-assembling peptides themselves (Fig.
14
). The
functional motifs are on the C-termini, since peptide synthesis starts from C-termini
to avoid deletion during synthesis. Usually a spacer comprising two glycine residues
is added to guarantee a fl exible and correct exposure of the motifs to cell surface
receptors. Different functional motifs in various ratios can be incorporated in the same
scaffold. Upon exposure to solution with neutral pH, the functionalized sequences
self-assemble leaving the added motifs fl agging on both sides of each nanofi ber
(Fig.
14
). These nanofi bers with functional motifs take part in the overall scaffold thus
giving microenvironments functionalized with specifi c biological stimuli (Fig.
14
).
The self-assembling peptide scaffolds with functional motifs can be commer-
cially produced with a reasonable cost. Thus, this method can be readily adopted for
widespread uses including study how cell interact with their local- and microenvi-
ronments, cell migrations in 3-D, tumor and cancer cells' interactions with normal
cells, cell process and neurite extensions, cell-based drug test assays and other
diverse applications.
We have produced different designer peptides from a variety of functional
motifs with different lengths (Gelain et al.
2006
; Horii et al.
2007
) . We showed that
the addition of motifs to the self-assembling peptide RADA16-I did not inhibit
