Morphological Evaluation of Freeze-Dried Fish Gelatin and Bovine Gelatin Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering

Scaffolds are three dimensional porous structures with interconnected pores intended for tissue regeneration. In this work, scaffolds from fish gelatin and bovine gelatin were obtained by freeze-drying method. Gelatin solutions were frozen at different temperatures to evaluate their effect on the morphology and pore size of the obtained scaffold. The chemical composition of the material was evaluated by FTIR analysis. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) was used to observe the cross-section of the scaffolds. These images were utilized to perform a surface morphological analysis. The morphological characterization was carried out with ImageJ software, obtaining the average pore diameter, average orthogonal pore area and surface porosity. It was found that the freezing temperature is determinant in the structural morphology of the scaffolds regardless of the gelatin species, obtaining average pore sizes ranging from 106.32 µm to 220.54 µm, making them suitable for Tissue Engineering applications.