Polypyrrole and laminin coated PMMA nanofiber scaffold for skeletal muscle tissue engineering Kamalia Z1,BHI Ruszymah1,2,SR Chowdhury1 1Tissue Engineering Centre,Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Medical Centre,Malaysia 2Department of Physiology,Faculty of Medicine,Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Skeletal muscle mainly contains contractile myoblasts and non-contractile fibroblasts.The extracellular matrix(ECM)microenvironment of muscle strictly regulates the population of these cells for desired tissue function.Electro-conductivity is another unique feature of muscle tissue that requires for its contractile activity.To resemble the native tissue,we fabricated electrospun polymethylmethacrylate(PMMA)nanofibers coated with laminin and polypyrrole(PPy)(PMMA-Lam-PPy)for skeletal muscle tissue engineering.In this construct,PMMA nanofibers coated with laminin mimics the ECM microenvironment for skeletal muscle tissue,while PPy contributes electro-conductivity.PMMA nanofibers were fabricated by electrospun technique and coated with laminin(50g/ml)and polypyrrole(0.25%).Scanning electron microscopy analysis demonstrated that average diameter of PMMA nanofibers was approximately 380 nm.Coating with PPy and laminin marginally increase the fibre diameters,however,no significant difference was observed.Fourier transform infra-red analysis confirms the coating of PPy and laminin on the PMMA nanofibers scaffold.Four-point probe analysis revealed that the conductivity of the PMMA-Lam-PPy scaffold was approximately 4.5 s/cm2.Consequently,myoblasts and fibroblasts,isolated from skeletal muscle tissue of three consented patients,were co-cultured on PMMA-Lam-PPy scaffold.It was found that myoblast population increased by 20%during expansion on PMMA-Lam and PMMA-Lam-PPy due to the increase in myoblast growth rate than fibroblasts.Whereas,no changes in myoblast populations were observed on plain and PMMA nanofibers.These result suggested that coating with laminin and PPy produces a conductive scaffold which facilitates myoblast proliferation,thus,it could be a promising scaffold for muscle tissue engineering.