The Effect of Cross-Linking Agents and Collagen Concentrations on Properties of Collagen Scaffolds

Background]collagenbased scaffolds are appealing products for various applications in pharmaceutics and tissue engineering and military applications like wound healing.[objectives]this study was conducted to extract acid soluble collagen protein from calf skin tissue and crosslinked it using crosslinking agents. the collagen scaffolds with different 1ethyl3(3dimethyl aminopropyl) carbodiimide (edc) / nhydroxysuccinimide (nhs) molar ratios as crosslinking agents were investigated.[methods]the type i extracted collagen was used as a raw material for making collagen based scaffolds. different edc/nhs molar ratios as crosslinking agents were used. matrix morphology and mechanical strength of the scaffolds were determined to evaluate the physicochemical properties of the collagen matrices with different crosslinker molar ratios. furthermore collagen and crosslinked collagen were characterized using standard methods like sds page, ftir and sem analysis.[results]the results confirmed that the extracted collagen is pure and free of any noncollagen protein contamination. furthermore, the results showed that average pore size of the scaffolds from edc/nhs crosslinker with molar ratio of 1:1 (i) was less than the scaffolds that were made using edc/nhs crosslinker with molar ratio of 2:1 (ii). moreover, collagen samples that were crosslinked using 1:1 edc/nhs molar ratios showed increased mechanical strength comparing to 2:1 edc/nhs molar ratio.[conclusions]the applied protocol is a convenient method for extraction of collagen and obtaining pure calf skin collage type i. furthermore the best molar ratio of edc/nhs crosslinking agents to crosslink collagen is 1:1 for obtaining stronger collagen structure.