Silk fibroin scaffolds enhance cell commitment of adult rat cardiac progenitor cells.

摘要

The use of three-dimensional (3D) cultures may induce cardiac progenitor cells to synthesize theirudown extracellular matrix (ECM) and sarcomeric proteins to initiate cardiac differentiation. 3Dudcultures grown on synthetic scaffolds may favour the implantation and survival of stem cells for celludtherapy when pharmacological therapies are not efficient in curing cardiovascular diseases and whenudorgan transplantation remains the only treatment able to rescue the patient’s life. Silk fibroin-basedudscaffolds may be used to increase cell affinity to biomaterials and may be chemically modified toudimprove cell adhesion. In the present study, porous, partially orientated and electrospun nanometricudnets were used. Cardiac progenitor cells isolated from adult rats were seeded by capillarity in the 3Dudstructures and cultured inside inserts for 21 days. Under this condition, the cells expressed a highudlevel of sarcomeric and cardiac proteins and synthesized a great quantity of ECM. In particular,udpartially orientated scaffolds induced the synthesis of titin, which is a fundamental protein inudsarcomere assembly.