Bioinformatic Approaches to Tissue Engineering

Bioinformatic analyses of the human body have quickly risen to the forefront of medical research. Assessment of gene levels and mutations (transcriptomics), protein levels and activity (proteomics), and metabolite levels (metabolomics) have established unprecedented insights into human physiology and disease. Such studies have vastly improved our abilities to identify cancer mutations, biomarkers, and underlying disease factors and to understand evolution, signal transduction, and cell interactions, among countless other fields of interest. Importantly, omics technologies and bioinformatics remain limited by the challenges involved in analyzing human tissue, namely accessibility of patient samples of interest and confounding variables, such as other organ systems and patient factors.



The integration of bioinformatics and tissue engineering permits the development of models that better recapitulate the human condition. Engineered tissues can be more extensively compared to their native counterparts. Identifying tissue-specific signals can help in the differentiation of stem cells to mature epithelial cells. Disease- or drug-induced perturbations can be isolated at the organ level. The inclusion of patient-derived cells can facilitate the development of personalized models. This Research Topic aims to present the current advances in bioinformatic applications to tissue engineered systems and establish how these approaches can validate models of the human body or improve our understanding of biomedical phenomenon.



Both research manuscripts and review articles are welcome. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Biomaterial- and topography-induced changes in cell phenotypes and signaling.

• Omics analysis of the stem cell niche as it applies to stem cell differentiation.

• Exploration of cellular heterogeneity in engineered tissues.

• Comparative analysis of engineered tissues with native organs.

• Assessment of perturbed signalling pathways in engineered tissues in response to external perturbations.

• Bioinformatics analysis of organ-on-a-chip systems.