Palm readings: Manicaria saccifera palm fibers are biocompatible textiles with low immunogenicity

The Emerging Role of Decellularized Plant-Based Scaffolds as a New Biomaterial

“…One advantage of using cellulose-based vegetal material as a scaffold is the ability to build on this tissue construct. It has been demonstrated that a variety of cell types, including human endothelial cells [34,57,62], human dermal fibroblasts (HDFs) [35,58,62,65], human skeletal myoblasts [56], human cancer cell lines [32,55,70], human aortic smooth muscle cells [64], mesenchymal stem cells [34,35,54,64], human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) [52,63], and hiPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CM) [34], as well as mouse fibroblasts [32,53,64] and mouse myoblasts [32,56] (Figure 3a,b), can attach and survive on a variety of decellularized plant scaffolds for periods of several weeks. (c,d) Osteoblastic differentiation of hiPSCs on 3D plant scaffold.…”

“…This was initially demonstrated on apple tissue and then subsequently shown on numerous plants and stems such as spinach leaves [34], parsley stems [35], and palm fibers [64]. Although these cells have been shown to proliferate and seem healthy for a long period, additional work is required to clearly understand how they behave on this unique biomaterial and how their metabolism and biochemical and mechanical interactions are altered if any.…”

“…Additionally, it is of note that the alkali treatment performed on palm fibers served to remove lignin and surface impurities while simultaneously adding hydroxyl groups to the scaffold [64]. This resulted in a more negatively charged, hydrophilic surface that was highly conducive to cell attachment [64,73]. Thus, surface modifications can be used to chemically cross-link scaffolds to improve coating attachment as well as cell seeding.…”

Plant-Based Scaffolds Modify Cellular Response to Drug and Radiation Exposure Compared to Standard Cell Culture Models

“…More recently, a study showed the great potential of decellularized spinach leaves to model the cardiac environment by recellularizing both the inner vascular network of the plant with human endothelial cells and the surface of the leaf with cardiomyocytes showing that a multitude of plant-derived cellulose scaffolds are suitable in vitro (Gershlak et al, 2017). Many different cell types have been used to repopulate decellularized plant-derived scaffolds, including human endothelial cells (Gershlak et al, 2017;Dikici et al, 2019), human dermal fibroblasts (Fontana et al, 2017;Dikici et al, 2019), mouse fibroblasts (Modulevsky et al, 2014;James et al, 2020), mouse myoblasts (Modulevsky et al, 2014), human cervical cell lines (Modulevsky et al, 2014), human aortic smooth muscle cells (James et al, 2020), mesenchymal stem cells (Fontana et al, 2017;Gershlak et al, 2017;James et al, 2020) and stem cells derived cardiomyocytes (Gershlak et al, 2017), suggesting that cellulose scaffolds can attach either cell lines or primary cells.…”

Supercritical carbon dioxide decellularization of plant material to generate 3D biocompatible scaffolds

“…Upon re-cellularization, it has been demonstrated that human cells can attach, metabolize, proliferate and align to the surface microtopography of plant scaffolds 9,13,27 while the inner plant vasculature can also be endothelialized 8,10 . Interestingly, plant scaffolds have been tested in vivo and found to be pro-angiogenic, where blood vessels grew throughout the biomaterial demonstrating that the scaffold in vivo generates a low inflammatory response, while promoting cell invasion and extracellular matrix (ECM) deposition 7 .…”