Spinnability of collagen as a biomimetic material: A review

Abstract

In this review, an attempt was made to summarize some of the recent developments in the spinnability of purified collagen. Due to the excellent biological properties of this biopolymer, it is often chosen among other biomimetic materials for processing into fibrous assemblies. During the last two decades, the challenges associated with regenerated collagen fibers comprising inability to achieve sufficient tensile strength, reproducibility and failure to replicate the internal fibrillar structure, which are due to the lost properties from hierarchical structure consistent with collagen in native tissues, have been considered using the common spinning and the modification methods. Among the common spinning methods, dry spinning and wet spinning result in well-defined fibrous blocks with relatively high fiber diameters and alignment, while the ability of the electrospinning to fabricate custom-built nanofibers from collagen-based composites may be the main reason that made it the most applied method to mimic the structure of the collagen in native tissues. In this review, the modification and spinning methods, used for forming collagen fibers, were summarized and their strategy to achieve the modified and reinforced collagen fiber was studied.

Keywords: Blends; Chain entanglements; Collagen; Cross-linking; Fiber spinning; Grating polymerization; Nanofiller; Non-covalent conjugation.