Figure 4.

Vascularization of engineered myocardial tissue following subcutaneous implantation into mice. (A) Representative confocal microscopy images of CD31 staining (green) within en face sections of engineered myocardial tissues derived from randomly oriented or aligned nanofibrillar scaffolds containing iCMs, iECs, or iCM+iECs at 2 weeks after subcutaneous implantation. Acell denotes acellular scaffold. (B) Distribution of vessel orientations within explanted engineered myocardial tissue, relative to the axis of the aligned microfibers as longitudinal, transverse, or other. (C) Quantification of the global angle of vessel alignment within subcutaneously explanted engineered myocardial tissues, relative to the axis of the aligned microfibers. The global angle of vessel alignment is calculated as the angle formed by the direction of the longitudinally oriented vessel with respect to the axis of the aligned microfibers. For randomly oriented scaffolds, an arbitrary axis was selected (n ≥ 3). (D) Quantification of murine capillary density within the explanted engineered myocardial tissue (n ≥ 3). *Denotes statistically significant in comparison (P < 0.05).