Morphometric analysis of dermal collagen can provide quantitative support to dermatologic research. The authors of this article disclose a technique of digital image analysis which allows the identification of microscopic structures by color cluster segmentation regarding the estimate intensity and density of dermal collagen fibers.

Tannery wastewater usually contains a high salinity due to the use of sodium chloride (NaCl) in curing and pickling. Although some no-pickle tanning and salt-free pickling technologies were developed, few of them have been widely used due to relatively poor mechanical and bulk properties of the resultant leather. Therefore, the role of NaCl in pickling and tanning should be elucidated in the fi...

Adv. Mater. 2010, 22, 2041–2044 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag G T IO N Emerging biomaterials based upon analogues of native extracellular matrix proteins provide an opportunity to create protein scaffolds that mimic tissue mechanical behavior and guide cellular responses. However, in order to reproduce macroscale tissue properties, protein analogues must be endowed with appropriate microstructural feat...

BACKGROUND Birefringence can reveal much of the morphology, molecular order, heterogeneity of fiber orientation, and nonlinear optical properties of biopolymers such as collagen. However, the detailed characterization of skin collagen fibers using optical anisotropy methods remains elusive. A clear understanding of collagen fiber organization in skin tissues may be important in the interpretati...

Disorganization of the valve extracellular matrix (ECM) is a hallmark of calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD). However, while microarchitectural features of the ECM can strongly influence the biological and mechanical behavior of tissues, little is known about the ECM microarchitecture in CAVD. In this work, we apply advanced imaging techniques to quantify spatially heterogeneous changes in col...

Although tissue engineering of artificial organs such as skin or cartilage have been developed greatly, organs such as kidney or liver have not been completed yet. Human kidney consists of one million of nephrons which is the basic unit for the filtration of blood, excretion of urine, secretion of cytokine and re-absorption of electrolytes. Every nephron comprising glomerulus and tubule with co...

Collagen fiber orientation is one aspect of the microstructure of bone that influences its mechanical properties. While the spatial distribution of preferentially oriented collagen is hypothesized to reflect the effects of loading during the process of aging, its variability in a modern human sample is essentially unknown. In a large sample (n = 67) of autopsied adults, the variability of colla...

Collagen fibers have been formed in vitro by the action of heparm on solutions of collagen. Heparin was found to be effective in inducing collagen fiber formation when present in concentrations as low as 1-80,000. It is postulated that mast cells, by virtue of the heparin which they produce, may play a role in the formation of collagen.