The large surface area and ability to retain moisture of textile structures enable microorganisms’ growth, which causes a range of undesirable effects, not only on the textile itself, but also on the user. Due to the public health awareness of the pathogenic effects on personal hygiene and associated health risks, over the last few years, intensive research has been promoted in order to minimize microbes’ growth on textiles. Therefore, to impart an antimicrobial ability to textiles, different approaches have been studied, being mainly divided into the inclusion of antimicrobial agents in the textile polymeric fibers or their grafting onto the polymer surface. Regarding the antimicrobial agents, different types have been used, such as quaternary ammonium compounds, triclosan, metal salts, polybiguanides or even natural polymers. Any antimicrobial treatment performed on a textile, besides being efficient against microorganisms, must be non-toxic to the consumer and to the environment. This review mainly intends to provide an overview of antimicrobial agents and treatments that can be performed to produce antimicrobial textiles, using chemical or physical approaches, which are under development or already commercially available in the form of isolated agents or textile fibers or fabrics.

Tendons are composed by extracellular collagen fibres arranged in regular arrays and are responsible to transmit tensile forces from a muscle to a bone. Due to their poor healing ability, in some cases tendons injuries are debilitating impairments that affect life quality among adult population worldwide. In the last years, attending to the social and economic concern associated to the high prevalence of tendons injuries and the limited success of the available current treatments, several scaffolds have been developed. Some of these scaffolds are intended to be used as graft-augmentation devices and others to fully replace a damaged tendon. The synthetic ones present superior mechanical characteristics compared to biological scaffolds. However, attending to the specific tendons physiology, even the synthetic scaffolds still don´t present the ideal mechanical properties to accomplish a complete and long-term functional tissue repair. Therefore, to enhance tendogenesis when using a tendon engineering approach, several methodologies have been developed to associate with scaffolds, including surface modification and cell seeding.

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