Fluorescent pictures of the tissue engineered skin constructs <i>in vivo</i>.

<p>Skin constructs were implanted in dorsal skin fold chambers in mice for 11. The sections show an overview of the junction between the inserted skin construct (m = Matriderm®) and native mouse skin (n) with either fluorescence microscopy (A, C) or transmitted light microscopy (B). Two different situations concerning the epidermis were observed during analysis of the junction zones: In some cases, as depicted in (A), the normal mouse epidermis (ne) started to grow on top of the Matriderm®, where it connected to the epidermis formed by the printed keratinocytes (pk). The latter were labelled in green by stable transduction (HaCaT-eGFP). In other cases, as depicted in (B) and (C), the epidermis formed by the printed keratinocytes ended at the border of the Matriderm®, synchronous to the presence of the printed fibroblasts (pf) labelled in red (NIH3T3-mCherry). As can be seen by comparing (B) and (C) - which depict the same location - the keratinocytes even partly grew on top of the normal mouse epidermis. In both cases, the printed fibroblasts formed a multi-layer tissue underneath the printed keratinocytes. Partly, they also migrated into the Matriderm®. All scale bars depict 200 µm.