Liquid Crystalline Ordered Collagen Substrates for Applications in Tissue Engineering

This report describes methods for fabricating substrates with anisotropic order from a single solution of high concentration collagen. By exploiting the intrinsic property of collagen to behave as a cholesteric liquid crystal, we demonstrate first the production of dense collagen films containing anisotropic fibers by simple dialysis and polymerization in ammonia vapor. We then utilized shear driven alignment of collagen using viscous extrusion...