Designing a synthetic peptide-based scaffold for in-vitro modelling of heart development

无论是为了了解发育生物学，还是疾病发展或药物毒性，合成和完全确定的细胞龛的设计对于基本理解体外模型及其不使用源自定义不清的动物性产品的人工制品至关重要。在这种情况下，心脏是研究人员关注的关键器官之一。该项目旨在开发一种工具，充分定义细胞生态位，用于构建体外心脏发育模型，利用心脏细胞共培养的最新进展，这将有助于提供世界级的生物科学。此外，该工作将利用工业生物技术的最新进展，利用短从头设计肽组装的自组装和凝胶特性。

The design of synthetic and fully defined cell niches is key to the fundamental understanding of in-vitro models and their use without artefacts originating from the use of poorly defined animal-based products, whether to understand the developmental biology, or disease development or drugs toxicity. In this context the heart is one of the key organs on which researchers have focussed. The project aims to develop a tool, fully defined cell niche, for the building of a in-vitro heart development model exploiting recent advances in cardiac cell co-culture that will contribute to the delivery of World-Class Bioscience. In addition, the work will exploit recent advances in Industrial Biotechnology by exploiting the self-assembly and gelation properties on short de-novo designer peptide assembly.