Sea pork 'nanowhiskers' may grow human muscle tissue

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Sea pork 'nanowhiskers' may grow human muscle tissue by Becky Crew cosmosmagazine.com Online

Tiny whiskers taken from tunicates, commonly known as sea squirts or sea pork, are the latest source of material used in artificial tissue research. Credit: University of Manchester

SYDNEY: Tiny ‘nanowhiskers’ derived from sea creatures could help scientists to engineer working human muscle tissue, a new study has found, taking renewable material research to miniscule new levels.

According to laboratory tests, cellulose-based whiskers from seabed-dwelling filter feeders called tunicates, commonly known as sea squirts or sea pork, can influence the behaviour of skeletal muscle cells. At several thousand times smaller than muscle cells, these whiskers are the smallest physical feature found to cause cell alignment, and it’s hoped that this discovery will improve regenerative medicine technology in the future.

“Other researchers have shown that nanoscale features such as this can induce contact guidance in other cell types but rarely using features smaller than a few tens of nanometers and never before in muscle cells,” said PhD student James Dugan from the University of Manchester in the UK.

Influencing the motion of cells

The topography of a material surface has important influence on cell behaviour and physiological functions, as they induce a phenomenon known as ‘contact guidance’.

It was first proposed by American biologist and anatomist Ross Granville Harrison when he studied cells growing on fibres from a spider's web in the early 20th century, noticing that the topography of the web could influence the direction of the cells’ motion.

This phenomenon has enjoyed widespread interest from scientists, engineers and clinicians - especially those in the field of regenerative material and tissue engineering research - as it can not only assist in the construction of a cell population with defined orientation, (for example in nerve, tendon repair and regeneration) and the genesis of normal bone morphology, but it can also be used in controlling the interactions between both natural and synthetic materials and cells or tissues.

“This new research gives us an interesting insight into contact guidance in cells, which means they follow a certain direction based on the surface they’re sitting on. Microfibres have already been shown to do this, but these researchers are doing it using tiny dimensions, much smaller than cells, and still seeing changes in the direction,” said Andrea O’Connor from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Melbourne.

Long, thin whiskers ideal

By using the cellulose-based nanowhiskers, the University of Manchester researchers were able to take advantage of this material’s unique properties. Cellulose is a polysaccharide – a long chain of sugars joined together – usually found in plants and is the main component of paper and certain textiles such as cotton.

“We are interested in finding exciting new applications for cellulose based materials and in particular nanowhiskers. Cellulose is already used in some biomedical applications such as wound dressings but we wanted to find out if the unusual shape of the whiskers could be used to produce specific responses in living cells,” said Dugan.

“It's this whisker-like shape that allows us to orientate the whiskers in such a way that leads to contact guidance in the cells that we grow on them,” he said.