Determination of Parameters to Induce Self-Assembly of Collagen on a Conductive Substrate
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Date
2019-12
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
As an engineering view, bone is an interesting material whose material composition and properties are controlled by external stimuli to maintain the mechanical integrity. To achieve this, bone has a hierarchical structure and heterogeneous compositions mostly consisting of type I collagen and inorganic mineral part. The type I collagen is a fibrillar form of protein acting as basic building block in bone tissue, which can be assembled in an ordered fashion with mineral by responding to external loading. Thus, forming the mineralized collagen matrix known as the mineralization process controls the mechanical stiffness of bone during bone formation, remodeling, and healing. Although mineralized collagen structure has been well-known, its role and assembly mechanism during the bone mineralization process has not been fully understood yet. Moreover, the collagen has mechanoelectric coupling that is considered as one of candidate to control the mechanism that is also not well understood. Thus, in order to understand the role of collagen during the process, it is necessary to fabricate the collagen matrix on the conductive substrate, as a way to affirm its mechanoelectric properties. In this study, we investigated the quality and quantity of assembled collagen matrix on conductive substrate depending on a variety of conditions, collagen concentration, ion concentration, and pH level by using atomic force microscopy (AFM). In addition, we studied effect of electric field on the assembly process. For the results, we obtained a well-assembled collagen matrix on the conductive substrate but found that the electric field on the substrate does not affect the alignment of assembled collagen matrix for the current experimental setup. Adjustment of the experiment is required.
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Keywords
collagen alignment, assembly, conductive substrate, surface, electric field