Biological Designer Self-Assembling Peptide Nanofiber Scaffolds Significantly Enhance Osteoblast Proliferation, Differentiation and 3-D Migration
Published online 2007 February 7. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000190.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1784071
The authors have developed new biomimetic designer self-assembling peptide scaffolds to enhance pre-osteoblast proliferation, differentiation and migration. Self-assembling peptide nanofiber scaffolds have been shown to be an excellent biological material for 3-dimension cell culture and stimulating cell migration into the scaffold. The authors designed one of the pure self-assembling peptide scaffolds RADA16-I through direct coupling to short biologically active motifs. The self-assembling peptide scaffolds showed to be effective at enhancing cellular proliferation and differentiation. Particularly, they selected three active motifs which included cell secreted signal peptide (osteogenic growth peptide), cell attachment domain of extracellular matrix (osteopontin) and designed RGD cell attachment sequence. RGD ( a short peptide sequence Arg–Gly–Asp) is present in fibronectin and many other extracellular matrix proteins.
The results of the study clearly demonstrated that the designer self-assembling peptide scaffolds significantly enhanced mouse pre-osteoblast cell proliferation and differentiation. It also stimulated cell migration into the 3D scaffold. These experiments showed that cell proliferation is enhanced using the mix of functional and pure RADA16 peptide scaffold. These results suggest that designer peptide scaffolds may be useful for bone regeneration and bone tissue engineering.
The study was interesting because of its future potential. The simple addition of short, biologically active peptide motifs have been shown here to significantly enhance particular cellular activities. This opens a new way to design new biologically active scaffolds for specific tissue repair and tissue engineering.
6 comments:
Do you know how big the these cells are? I'm assuming they are on the micron scale, which makes me wonder how far these cells actually migrated into the scaffold since the fibers and pores are both on the nanometer scale.
There are a number of researches that utilize of self assembly property of polymer to form bio-functional scaffold. I am wondering if there are any explanations as to how and why self-assembly property of polypeptide can be biologically useful, in this case enhancing cell proliferation and differentiation?
I was under the impression that they do migrate but that this accelerates the process. I would assume that the synthesis of osteopontin increases the number of focal adhesions which makes it easier to migrate.
The authors never presented data showing how far the cells migrated, but they did state that there was significantly migration and supported this statistically (95%) with the t-test.
You pretty much answered your own question numrin. These self assembling scaffolds are biologically useful because they enhance cell proliferation, differention, and migration. This is because adding the specific motiffs enhances all these properties over other scaffolds.
Did the authors test scaffolds containing just single (one type) or multiple (many types) motifs?
If so, did they discover an "ideal" mixture that most effectively enhances proliferation and differentiation?
What future studies do you think should be done to help move this project toward the goal of clinically available scaffolds?
Also, it seems that there have been many attempts at creating scaffolds to enhance bone proliferation.
Do you think that this method can be combined with other methods to improve performance?
What about this scaffold makes it well suited for bone cells? Has there been any interest in using this same scaffold or at the the same method to create scaffolds for other types of cell cultures?
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