Peptide Scaffolds for Nerve Tissue Engineering

Scaffolds are one of the most important components in tissue engineering (TE), which should satisfy the following properties: biocompatibility, biodegradability, good mechanical properties and reliable batch production. Therefore, the material chosen for the fabrication of scaffolds is of critical importance. Silk fibroin (SF) is an attractive scaffold material that has been extensively used in TE. However, SF shows poor performance in nerve TE due to lack of active peptide sequences. Peptide amphiphiles are another type of recognized scaffold materials for TE. They can be further divided into a few sub-classes, of which ionic self-complementary peptides and lipidated peptide amphiphiles have been reported to be applied in nerve TE, while surfactant-like peptides have not as of yet. Therefore, in this study surfactant-like peptides will be a focus and their suitability will be investigated for nerve TE applications.