Fig. 7
Murine endothelialized engineered skeletal muscle promotes vascular anastomosis and revascularization in a mouse model of volumetric muscle loss. a Representative confocal microscopy images of perfused vasculature from transverse tissue sections in the region of regeneration adjacent to the endothelialized randomly oriented or endothelialized aligned transplanted skeletal muscle constructs at 21 days after implantation. Endothelial cells are identified by CD31 (red) expression. Perfused vessels are indicated by co-expression of CD31 (red) and fluorescently labeled isolectin (turquois). b Perfused vessel density in the region of regeneration (n ≥ 4, **p ≤ 0.01). Dotted line denotes the levels of the acellular scaffold control. c Bioluminescence imaging of randomly oriented or aligned skeletal muscle constructs seeded with bioluminescent endothelial cells transplanted into ablated muscle. d Perfused vessel organization within transplanted endothelialized engineered muscle formed from randomly oriented or aligned scaffolds. Inset shows the arrangement of myofibers and the associated vessel architecture as visualized by green fluorescence protein (GFP) expression (turquois) in the transplanted myofibers and fluorescently labeled isolectin (red). Arrow designates orientation of aligned nanofibrillar scaffold. Scale bars denote 100 μm (a), 1 cm (c), and 50 μm (d). Error bars represent standard deviation
