The goal of this project was to explore how to control and manipulate the spontaneous polymerization of collagen, the primary material that makes up native tissue, in order to increase the accessibility of collagen in the design of biomaterials and regenerative medicine. In our previous work, we demonstrated that we could increase both the solubility and polymerization time of collagen with the addition of sugars. In this paper, we further examined the mechanism behind this inhibiting effect and determined that the delay caused by the sugars was not damaging to the collagen fibers. In addition, we performed a proof-of-concept experiment where the presence of the sugars allowed us to controllably transfer, extrude, and deposit collagen into organized patterns. Overall, our work illustrates how sugar-mediated collagen assembly can be beneficial in the development of new biomaterials.
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