3D ARTIFICIAL MATRICES FOR BIOMEDICAL PURPOSES; SYNTHESIS AND SPECTROSCOPIC CHARACTERISATION
Juhász Ákos György
Theoretical and Translational Medicine
Dr. Kellermayer Miklós
Lille-i Egyetem
2023-05-26 10:00:00
Cellular and Molecular Physiology
Dr. Hunyady László
Dr. Jedlovszky-Hajdú Angéla, Dr. Smeller László
Sophie Fourmentin-Lamotte
Szilágyi István
Frédéric Affouard
Oleg Kalugin
Kellermayer Miklós
Zelkó Romána
3D scaffold produced by electrospinning mimic the native extracellular matrix, has better processability than conventional electrospinning. For tissue engineering applications would be ideal to use these scaffolds although the causes of this phenomena are still uncovered. Therefore, my aim was to create and characterize 3D electrospun fibers with electrospinning technique and investigate the behavior of the solvent salt and solvent-water interactions with different computational simulation methods.
Firstly, I analyzed DMF-water mixtures of various compositions from the molecular dynamics simulation data with radial distribution, nearest neighbor and Voronoi polyhedra methods. The results clearly show that DMF mix very well with water on molecular scale, while there’s some tendency for self-association even in their dilute systems. The water-water H-bonds are remains while increasing DMF mole fraction values parallel the water clusters are disappearing. This is explained by the increasing CH3 groups enhance H-bonding structure, and also by the DMF’s O atoms can easily replace water oxygens.
Then, I characterized the DMF-salt interactions with DFT calculations and Vibrational spectroscopy. Unlike before, the anion was also included to the calculation. While the concentration of the salt in DMF was quite saturated, the results are align with experimental data. Both the calculated and the experimental data suggest that MgCl2 tends to have the strongest interaction with DMF (and also water) molecules, while all of them forms complexes with the solvent molecule. Only the salts where complex forming can be found produced 3D structure during electrospinning method, therefore the quality of the salt and its interaction with the solvent molecule is a key to a successful outcome, not just charge accumulation as thought before.
Lastly, I reproducibly created solvent free 3D PSI meshes and characterized with SEM and Vibrational spectroscopy. While one can observe a difference in fiber diameter, from the statistics there’s no correlation with the salt concentration. While gelation occurs at some cases, CaCl2 can be a good candidate in the future to better optimize the electrospinning parameters and used for biomedical applications.
These findings can lead to the final understanding how the 3D structure can be achieved with different polymers however there’ still a lot of work ahead.
