Soft Matter Blog

Soft Matter and Journal of Materials Chemistry have recently published a series of review articles as part of the joint themed issue  on materials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. We’ve brought these articles together as they collectively make a great overview of this important and evolving area.

• Dense fibrillar collagen matrices for tissue repair
• Polyglycerol nanogels: highly functional scaffolds for biomedical applications
• Designing biomimetic scaffolds for bone regeneration: why aim for a copy of mature tissue properties if nature uses a different approach?
• Design of biomaterials to enhance stem cell survival when transplanted into the damaged central nervous system
• Biomaterials-based microfluidics for engineered tissue constructs
• Novel matrix based anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) regeneration
• Thermosets synthesized by thermal polyesterification for tissue engineering applications
• Biomaterials and their potential applications for dental tissue engineering
• Development of bone substitute materials: from ‘biocompatible’ to ‘instructive’
• Magnetic nanoparticles: biomedical applications and challenges
• The high functionalization of temperature-responsive culture dishes for establishing advanced cell sheet engineering
• Fiber-reinforced scaffolds for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine: use of traditional textile substrates to nanofibrous arrays
• Design principles for polymers as substratum for adherent cells
• Sugars: burden or biomaterials of the future? 
• Multimodal biomaterial strategies for regeneration of infarcted myocardium
• Biomaterials for stem cell differentiation

The full issues for Soft Matter and Journal of Materials Chemistry include the original research articles. We hope you’ll enjoy reading them. 

Soft Matter issue 20 was part of a themed on tissue engineering. The guest editors for this issue were Molly M. Stevens and Ali Khademhosseini. You can read their editorial here. In it they discuss emerging materials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

The paper featured on the outside front cover was ‘Fibronectin-mimetic peptide-amphiphile nanofiber gels support increased cell adhesion and promote ECM production‘ by Efrosini Kokkoli and co-workers at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA.

The inside front cover featured ‘Guiding endothelial progenitor cell tube formation using patterned fibronectin surfaces‘ by Sharon Gerecht and co-workers at Johns Hopkins University, USA.

The papers published in Journal of Materials Chemistry (Issue 40, 2010) as part of the joint themed issue are available here.

We are delighted to announce a high-profile themed issue on the Dynamics and Rheology of Fluid Interfaces to be published in 2011. Professor Gerald Fuller (Stanford University, USA) and Professor Jan Vermant (K.U. Leuven, Belgium) are the Guest Editors and it is our pleasure to invite you to submit to this themed issue.

Now in its sixth year of publication, Soft Matter has quickly been established as the platform where biologists, colloid scientists, physicists, polymer scientists, chemical engineers, chemists, and materials scientists can present work for interdisciplinary inspiration. We have published several themed issues on other important emerging topics in recent years, and it now seems particularly timely to publish a focused set of articles covering the Dynamics and Rheology of Fluid Interfaces. The key aim is to highlight the most important areas and directions in this field within a high quality and high impact issue.

The deadline for the receipt of manuscripts for this themed issue is 15th February 2011.

Submissions, either communications or full papers, should be high-quality manuscripts of original, unpublished research, containing important new insight. All submissions will be subject to rigorous peer review to meet the usual high standards of Soft Matter. Accepted manuscripts will be shown to the Guest Editors to ensure they are suitable for the scope of the theme issue.

Manuscripts can be submitted using our online submission service. Please state in your covering letter that your article was submitted in response to the Call for Papers for the themed issue on the Dynamics and Rheology of Fluid Interfaces.