Figure 4.

Overview of the study’s design. Micro-computed tomography (mCT) scans of the unseeded scaffolds were conducted before implantation (T0). The scaffolds then underwent cell seeding, were implanted into the mice, and were scanned again directly after explantation (T1). After the T1 scan, the scaffolds were embedded in paraffin and subjected to histomorphometric (Histo) processing and qPCR. For that, directly consecutive paraffin sections were prepared: A defined number of sections went to histomorphometric evaluation (a) and a defined number of the following sections were subjected to RNA isolation in preparation for qPCR (b).