The preparation and comparison of decellularized nerve scaffold of tissue engineering

To integrate tissue engineering concepts into strategies to repair spinal cord injury (SCI) has been a hotspot in recent years, and the choice of scaffolding material is crucial to tissue engineering. Recently, decellularized nerve scaffold becomes a central concern due to its peculiar superiority. In this study, the decellularized nerve scaffold was prepared with three different methods and a comparison was made to acquire an ideal scaffold materials. All sciatic nerves from Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats were randomly divided into four groups: A: normal control group, B: TritonX-100 with sodium deoxycholate group, C: TritonX-100 with enzyme group and D: freezing-thawing with enzyme group. Histology and transmission electron microscope were exploited to evaluate the effect of removing cells and immunological histological chemistry was exploited to evaluate immunogenicity. Meanwhile the mechanical properties were evaluated by mechanics index. Hematoxylin and eosin (HE) staining and electron microscopic examinations reveal that the cell components and myelin sheaths are the least in the freezing-thawing with enzyme group. Immunohistochemistry shows that the immunogenicity is lower in group B, C, and D than the control group, and the group D has the lowest immunogenicity. Mechanical testing shows that there is no significant difference after acellular processing. Sciatic nerve, cell-extracted by freezing-thawing with enzyme, could obtain the ideal scaffold materials which has no cells and myelin sheaths. In addition, the decellularized nerve scaffold has no immunogenicity and the mechanical property of normal sciatic nerve is preserved.