SCIENCE@home

Hybrid hydrogels containing vertically aligned carbon nanotubes with anisotropic electrical conductivity for muscle myofiber fabrication

S. Ahadian,J. Ramón‐Azcón,M. Estili,X. Liang,S. Ostrovidov,H. Shiku,M. Ramalingam,K. Nakajima,Y. Sakka,Hojae Bae,T. Matsue,A. Khademhosseini

Published 2014 in Scientific Reports

ABSTRACT

Biological scaffolds with tunable electrical and mechanical properties are of great interest in many different fields, such as regenerative medicine, biorobotics and biosensing. In this study, dielectrophoresis (DEP) was used to vertically align carbon nanotubes (CNTs) within methacrylated gelatin (GelMA) hydrogels in a robust, simple and rapid manner. GelMA-aligned CNT hydrogels showed anisotropic electrical conductivity and superior mechanical properties compared with pristine GelMA hydrogels and GelMA hydrogels containing randomly distributed CNTs. Skeletal muscle cells grown on vertically aligned CNTs in GelMA hydrogels yielded a higher number of functional myofibers than cells that were cultured on hydrogels with randomly distributed CNTs and horizontally aligned CNTs, as confirmed by the expression of myogenic genes and proteins. In addition, the myogenic gene and protein expression increased more profoundly after applying electrical stimulation along the direction of the aligned CNTs due to the anisotropic conductivity of the hybrid GelMA-vertically aligned CNT hydrogels. We believe that platform could attract great attention in other biomedical applications, such as biosensing, bioelectronics and creating functional biomedical devices.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-57 of 57 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-100 of 236 citing papers · Page 1 of 3

123
Next