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Liquid crystal?based elastomers in tissue engineering

In the recent few decades, a wide variety of hard and soft materials have been explored for the design of biological systems. Liquid crystals (LCs) are soft matters which pretend to self?organize on microscopic and mesoscopic scales. This review article covers the LC elastomer applications combining both biology and engineering related to tissue engineering. We focus on LC elastomers which serve as a new type of smart material in the field of biomaterials, such as actuators, scaffolds, and spinal discs.Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) play role in tissue engineering investigations, with the combination of orientational ordering generated by liquid crystal (LC) moieties and the elastic capabilities of polymers. Liquid crystal?based polymer materials require a thorough understanding of their features that set them apart from other smart materials for proper design and application. LCEs offer many advantages for their widespread use in the field of biomaterials, by virtue of their simplicity of processing, anisotropic behavior, and responding to numerous external stimuli. Especially, LCEs have widespread usage in bioengineering applications such as scaffolds due to their biocompatibility, viability, and proliferation properties of these materials. This study introduces a brief overview of the new areas of liquid crystal?based elastomer applications combining both biomaterials and engineering.

Publication date: 27/01/2022

BIOTECHNOLOGY & BIOENGINEERING

      

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870292.