Bioreactor cultivation condition for engineered bone tissue: Effect of various bioreactor designs on extra cellular matrix synthesis.

Dynamic-based systems are bio-designed in order to mimic the micro-environments of the bone tissue. There is limited direct comparison between perfusion and perfusion-rotation forces in designing a bioreactor. Hence, in current study, we aimed to compare given bioreactors for bone regeneration. Two types of bioreactors including rotating & perfusion and perfusion bioreactors were designed. Mesenchymal stem cells derived from buccal fat pad were loaded on a gelatin/ß-Tricalcium phosphate scaffold. Cell-scaffold constructs were subjected to different treatment condition and place in either of the bioreactors. Effect of different dynamic conditions on cellular behavior including cell proliferation, cell adhesion, and osteogenic differentiation were assessed. Osteogenic assessment of scaffolds after 24 days revealed that rotating & perfusion bioreactor led to significantly higher expression of OCN and RUNX2 genes and also greater amount of ALP and collagen I protein production compared to static groups and perfusion bioreactor. Observation of cellular sheets which filled the scaffold porosities in SEM images, approved the better cell responses to rotating & perfusion forces of the bioreactor. The outcomes demonstrated that rotating & perfusion bioreactor action on bone regeneration is much preferable than perfusion bioreactor. Therefore, it seems that exertion of multi-stimuli is more effective for bone engineering.

Tunable Multiscale Nanoparticle Ordering by Polymer Crystallization.

While ∼75% of commercially utilized polymers are semicrystalline, the generally low mechanical modulus of these materials, especially for those possessing a glass transition temperature below room temperature, restricts their use for structural applications. Our focus in this paper is to address this deficiency through the controlled, multiscale assembly of nanoparticles (NPs), in particular by leveraging the kinetics of polymer crystallization. This process yields a multiscale NP structure that is templated by the lamellar semicrystalline polymer morphology and spans NPs engulfed by the growing crystals, NPs ordered into layers in the interlamellar zone [spacing of [Formula: see text] (10-100 nm)], and NPs assembled into fractal objects at the interfibrillar scale, [Formula: see text] (1-10 µm). The relative fraction of NPs in this hierarchy is readily manipulated by the crystallization speed. Adding NPs usually increases the Young's modulus of the polymer, but the effects of multiscale ordering are nearly an order of magnitude larger than those for a state where the NPs are not ordered, i.e., randomly dispersed in the matrix. Since the material's fracture toughness remains practically unaffected in this process, this assembly strategy allows us to create high modulus materials that retain the attractive high toughness and low density of polymers.

Role of block copolymer adsorption versus bimodal grafting on nanoparticle self-assembly in polymer nanocomposites.

We compare the self-assembly of silica nanoparticles (NPs) with physically adsorbed polystyrene-block-poly(2-vinylpyridine) (PS-b-P2VP) copolymers (BCP) against NPs with grafted bimodal (BM) brushes comprised of long, sparsely grafted PS chains and a short dense carpet of P2VP chains. As with grafted NPs, the dispersion state of the BCP NPs can be facilely tuned in PS matrices by varying the PS coverage on the NP surface or by changes in the ratio of the PS graft to matrix chain lengths. Surprisingly, the BCP NPs are remarkably better dispersed than the NPs tethered with bimodal brushes at comparable PS grafting densities. We postulate that this difference arises because of two factors inherent in the synthesis of the NPs: In the case of the BCP NPs the adsorption process is analogous to the chains being "grafted to" the NP surface, while the BM case corresponds to "grafting from" the surface. We have shown that the "grafted from" protocol yields patchy NPs even if the graft points are uniformly placed on each particle. This phenomenon, which is caused by chain conformation fluctuations, is exacerbated by the distribution function associated with the (small) number of grafts per particle. In contrast, in the case of BCP adsorption, each NP is more uniformly coated by a P2VP monolayer driven by the strongly favorable P2VP-silica interactions. Since each P2VP block is connected to a PS chain we conjecture that these adsorbed systems are closer to the limit of spatially uniform sparse brush coverage than the chemically grafted case. We finally show that the better NP dispersion resulting from BCP adsorption leads to larger mechanical reinforcement than those achieved with BM particles. These results emphasize that physical adsorption of BCPs is a simple, effective and practically promising strategy to direct NP dispersion in a chemically unfavorable polymer matrix.

Self-Assembly of Monodisperse versus Bidisperse Polymer-Grafted Nanoparticles.

We systematically compare the dispersion and self-assembly of silica nanoparticles (NPs) grafted with either a sparse monomodal long chain length polystyrene (PS) brush or a bimodal brush comprised of a sparse grafting of long PS chains and a dense carpet of short poly(2-vinylpyridine) (P2VP) chains. These two different types of NPs are placed in pure PS matrices of varying molecular weights in a series of experiments. We first show that NP dispersion is generally improved in the case of bimodal brushes. More interestingly, at low PS grafting densities the bimodal brushes give different self-assembled structures relative to the monomodal brushes; we conjecture that the presence of the short P2VP chains in the bimodal brush reduces the effective core-core attractions and thus allows these bidisperse NPs to display self-assembly behavior that is less likely to be kinetically trapped by the strong intercore attractions that control the behavior of monomodal NPs. In this low PS grafting density limit, where we expect the spatial coverage of the brush to be the most nonuniform, we find the formation of "vesicular" structures that are representative of highly asymmetric ("tadpole") surfactants. Our results therefore show that reducing the inter-NP attractions gives rise to a much richer ensemble of NP self-assemblies, apparently with a smaller influence from kinetic traps (or barriers).