Aligned Fibrous Scaffold Induced Aligned Growth of Corneal Stroma Cells in vitro Culture

To investigate the contribution of fibre arrangement to guiding the aligned growth of corneal stroma cells, aligned and randomly oriented fibrous scaffolds of gelatin and poly-L-lactic acid(PLLA) were fabricated by electrospinning. A comparative study of two different systems with corneal stroma cells on randomly organized and aligned fibres were conducted. The efficiency of the scaffolds for inducing the aligned growth of cells was assessed by morphological observation and 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyl-tetrazolium bromide(MTT) assay. Results show that the cells cultured on both randomly oriented and aligned scaffolds maintained normal morphology and well spreading as well as long term proliferation. Importantly, corneal stroma cells grew high orderly on the aligned scaffold, while the cells grew disordered on the randomly oriented scaffold. Moreover, the cells exhibited higher viability in aligned scaffold than that in randomly oriented scaffold. These results indcate that electrospinng to prepare aligned fibrous scaffolds has provided an effective approach to the aligned growth of corneal stroma cells in vitro. Our findings that fiber arrangement plays a crucial role in guiding the aligned growth of cells may be helpful to the development of better biomaterials for tissue engineered cornea.