Improving bioartificial liver design

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 44 KB
• Volume: 106
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0006-3592
• DOI: 10.1002/bit.22805

✦ Synopsis

The silkworm synthesizes large amounts of silk proteins in its silk glands and spins them into silk fibers to build a cocoon. This ability to synthesize silk proteins in large quantities may be useful for the mass production of recombinant proteins. In this issue of B&B, Adachi and coworkers have succeeded in synthesizing a large amount of recombinant human collagen a chain (the non-triple helical a1 chain of human type I collagen) using a transgenic silkworm. They tested the possibility of using the collagen a chain as a cell culture scaffold, and found that cells could be cultured on the chain as on marketed gelatin-the denatured and fragmented form of collagen. Since the collagen a chain has uniform molecular weight and no risks of animal-derived pathogen contamination, the a chain is a promising candidate biomaterial as a high-quality and safe substitute for marketed gelatin.