An Exploration On The Enhacement Of Mechanical Properties For Zein Based Scaffolds

As the combination of medicine and engineering is getting more and more close,the research of scaffold materials for tissue engineering has taken an important part in this field.Because of its excellent biocompatibility and biodegradability,natural degradable polymer has gained widespread attention.Zein is a kind of natural polymer and is derived from corn.Zein contains a higher proportion of nonpolar amino acid residues,which can explain its special dissolution behavior that it can be soluble in a certain concentration range of alcohol.In the earlier research,our group has studied the drug delivery system and film forming system of zein microsphere,founding zein is a very ideal biomaterial.Our group also prepared porous zein scaffold with particle leaching method and it was proved to be with good mechanical properties,biodegradability and biocompatibility,which indicated zein was a fine choice for bone tissue engineering.Human bone can provide high strength and high modulus for the body due to its complicated hierarchical structure.However as bone scaffolds,natural polymer has the disadvantage of poor mechanical properties,which limits the practical application in biomedical area.Therefore,the improvement of mechanical properties on natural biodegradable polymer has been a hot topic in tissue engineering.In this paper,we discussed the influence factors of mechanical properties on zein based scaffold.In the first part,we investigated the effect of zein raw materials on the mechanical properties of the scaffolds,and the result suggested that the compressive property of zein B scaffold was relatively close to cortical bone.We also considered the influence of zein particle size on the zein based scaffolds.After adding zein microspheres to the raw materials,the compressive modulus of the scaffolds can be significantly enhanced.In the second part,we studied the environmental factors such as temperature and humidity.The experimental results showed that high temperature treatment on zein scaffolds can improve its allround mechanical properties,especially increasing its ductility greatly.But the high relative humidity will reduce the mechanical properties of the scaffold.The discussion above of the influence factors on the mechanical properties of zein scaffolds set a base for further research on zein scaffold preparation method and forming conditions.