Chitosan and polycaprolactone membranes patterned via electrospinning: effect of underlying chemistry and pattern characteristics on epithelial/fibroblastic cell behavior.

Electrospinning was used as an effective route to pattern chitosan (CS) and polycaprolactone (PCL) membranes with submicron fibers having different chemical structure (PCL or PCL/collagen) and physical characteristics (size: between ≈200 and 550 nm; randomly oriented or aligned form). While the PCL fibers with diameters in the same range (≈200 nm) were patterned on both of CS and PCL membranes to evaluate the influence of the underlying membrane chemistry, only CS membranes were patterned with PCL fibers having different sizes simply by changing the electrospinning conditions to investigate the effects of pattern characteristics. Furthermore, collagen was added to the PCL fiber structure to change the chemical composition of the fibers in a cell-attractive way.

Random/aligned electrospun PCL/PCL-collagen nanofibrous membranes: comparison of neural differentiation of rat AdMSCs and BMSCs.

In this study, the aligned (A) and randomly oriented (R) polycaprolactone (PCL-A and PCL-R) and PCL/collagen (PCL/Col-A and PCL/Col-R) nanofibers were electrospun onto smooth PCL membranes (PCLMs) prepared by solvent casting. In order to investigate the effects of chemical composition and nanotopography of fibrous surfaces on proliferation and on neural differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), adipose and bone marrow-derived rat MSCs (AdMSCs and BMSCs) were cultivated in suitable media i.e.