Mechanical conditioning of
many tissue engineered construct will be critical,
particularly mechano-responsive tissues such as
skeletal muscle. It has been shown that application
of defined uniaxial loads to 3D constructs through
the tensioning- culture force monitor (t-CFM), has
been shown to regulate protease expression in
fibroblasts (Prajapati et al. 2000). Insulin-like
growth factor (IGF-1) is an important growth factor
in proliferation and differentiation of skeletal
myoblasts (Florini et al. 1996), along with it a
recently isolated isoform, mechano-growth factor
(MGF) is found to be upregulated in skeletal
muscle in vivo following exercise (Yang et al.
1996)
