Designing a bioactive scaffold from coassembled collagen–laminin short peptide hydrogels for controlling cell behaviour

Nap-FFGSO, which has propensity to self-assemble in the presence of short laminin mimetic peptides. Interestingly, only 10% w/w of laminin peptides was sufficient to provide nucleation and growth of the nanostructures in the collagen inspired peptide and induces further self-assembly to create higher order structures. Such a nucleation and growth mechanism can trigger gelation in the collagen inspired peptides, which otherwise failed to form a gel under physiological conditions. We could achieve similar complexity in the designed matrix through utilization of simple non-covalent interactions, rather than covalent synthetic methodologies to create a dual functional matrix from the non-gelator collagen inspired peptide. The nanofibrous morphology generated through co-assembly can essentially mimic the structure and function of natural ECM, which enables the scaffold to communicate with cells through biochemical signals and promote cell growth, adhesion, proliferation and migration. We envisage that this structural mimicry of a native collagen fibrillar network using such a short peptide sequence can lead to new opportunities for developing next generation functional materials. The strategy of supramolecular assembly using multiple components could develop a plethora of viable biomaterials under physiological conditions.