Tethering QK peptide to enhance angiogenesis in elastin-like recombinamer (ELR) hydrogels

A smart bilayer scaffold of elastin-like recombinamer and collagen for soft tissue engineering.

Elastin-like recombinamers (ELRs) are smart, protein-based polymers designed with desired peptide sequences using recombinant DNA technology. The aim of the present study was to produce improved tissue engineering scaffolds from collagen and an elastin-like protein tailored to contain the cell adhesion peptide RGD, and to investigate the structural and mechanical capacities of the resulting sca...

Recombinant DNA technology and click chemistry: a powerful combination for generating a hybrid elastin-like-statherin hydrogel to control calcium phosphate mineralization

Understanding the mechanisms responsible for generating different phases and morphologies of calcium phosphate by elastin-like recombinamers is supreme for bioengineering of advanced multifunctional materials. The generation of such multifunctional hybrid materials depends on the properties of their counterparts and the way in which they are assembled. The success of this assembly depends on th...

The promotion of microvasculature formation in poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate hydrogels by an immobilized VEGF-mimetic peptide.

Microvascularization of tissue engineered constructs was achieved by utilizing a VEGF-mimicking peptide, QK, covalently bound to a poly(ethylene glycol) hydrogel matrix. The 15-amino acid peptide, developed by D'Andrea et al., was modified with a PEG-succinimidyl ester linker on the N-terminus of the peptide, then photocrosslinked onto the surface or throughout PEG hydrogels. PEGylation of the ...

An enzyme-assisted nanoparticle crosslinking approach to enhance the mechanical strength of peptide-based supramolecular hydrogels.

In this work we reported an enzyme-assisted nanoparticle crosslinking (EANC) strategy to enhance the mechanical stability of peptide-based supramolecular hydrogels by more than 3000 times.

Leukocyte Response to Elastin-like Polypeptide Coatings