Browsing by Author "Yildirim, Mine"

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Critical-Size Muscle Defect Regeneration Using an Injectable Cell-Laden Nanofibrous Matrix: An Ex Vivo Mouse Hindlimb Organ Culture Study
(MDPI, 2025) Jacho, Diego; Huynh, James; Crowe, Emily; Rabino, Agustin; Yildirim, Mine; Czernik, Piotr J.; Yildirim-Ayan, Eda
Musculoskeletal injuries involving volumetric muscle loss remain difficult to treat due to limited regenerative capacity and the lack of physiologically relevant experimental models. This study introduces a computer-controlled ex vivo mouse hindlimb culturing platform that applies dynamic mechanical loading to evaluate muscle regeneration in a critical-size tibialis anterior (TA) defect. The defect was treated with an injectable myoblast-laden nanofibrous scaffold composed of polycaprolactone nanofibers and collagen (PNCOL). The ex vivo mouse hindlimb culturing platform maintained tissue viability and transmitted physiological strain across bone and muscle without disrupting the unity of the bone-muscle structure. PNCOL treatment under mechanical loading enhanced muscle fiber organization, extracellular matrix regeneration, and anti-inflammatory responses (CD206) while upregulating paired box 7 (PAX7), myogenic factor 5 (MYF5), myogenic regulatory factor 4 (MRF4), and transforming growth factor beta1 (TGF beta 1) expression. Cytokine profiling revealed an anabolic shift involving wingless/integrated (WNT) and insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) signaling, indicating a pro-regenerative microenvironment. Overall, the combination of mechanical stimulation and biomaterial-based therapy significantly improved muscle regeneration within a controlled ex vivo model. This multidimensional approach provides a reproducible and ethical platform that advances musculoskeletal regenerative research while reducing animal use.
Citation - WoS: 1
Citation - Scopus: 1
Veterinary Ethics in Practice: Euthanasia Decision Making for Companion and Street Dogs in Istanbul
(MDPI, 2025) Yildirim, Mine
This article examines how veterinarians in Istanbul experience and navigate the ethical, emotional, and institutional complexities of performing euthanasia on dogs, with particular attention to the differences between companion and street dogs. Drawing on 29 in-depth interviews with private practice veterinarians in Istanbul, this study employs qualitative analysis using the NVivo 12 Plus software and reflexive thematic analysis to identify key patterns in moral reasoning, emotional labor, and clinical decision making. The findings indicate that euthanasia of companion dogs is often framed through shared decision making with guardians, emotional preparation, and post-procedural grief rituals. While still emotionally taxing, these cases are supported by relational presence and mutual acknowledgment. In contrast, euthanasia of street dogs frequently occurs in the absence of legal ownership, institutional accountability, or consistent caregiving, leaving veterinarians to bear the full moral and emotional weight of the decision. Participants described these cases as ethically distinct, marked by relational solitude, clinical ambiguity, and heightened moral distress. Six key themes that reveal how euthanasia becomes a site of both care and conflict when structural support is lacking are identified in this study, including emotional burden, ethical strain, and resistance to routinized killing. By foregrounding the roles of institutional absence and relational asymmetry in shaping end-of-life decisions, this study contributes to empirical veterinary ethics and calls for more contextually attuned ethical frameworks, particularly in urban settings with large populations of street dogs and culturally entrenched practices of collective guardianship and caregiving.
When Care Faces Violence: Anticipatory Grief, Chronic Vigilance, and Ambiguous Loss Among Street Dog Care-Givers in Istanbul
(MDPI, 2026) Yildirim, Mine
This article examines how Turkey's 2024 amendment to the Animal Protection Law reshapes volunteer caregiving for free-roaming dogs in Istanbul by reconfiguring the practical conditions under which care is sought, coordinated, and sustained. Drawing on 43 in-depth interviews and five months of fieldwork (1 July-30 November 2025), this study combines constructivist grounded theory with reflexive thematic analysis to trace how legal change is encountered through everyday governance interfaces and how these encounters reorganize caregivers' routines, capacities, and moral worlds. The analysis yields four interlocking findings. First, caregivers describe a temporality of living in pre-loss, in which anticipated removal, disappearance, and uncertain outcomes generate chronic vigilance, anticipatory grief, and ambiguous loss without closure. Second, caregiving is increasingly recalibrated as risk management: commitments persist, but intervention narrows through heightened exposure to complaints, reputational scrutiny, and fears that help-seeking may backfire. Third, institutional pathways-hotlines, shelter intake, and municipal responses-are experienced as discretionary and opaque, producing a fluctuating threshold between assistance and harm that conditions whether caregivers engage official systems at all. Fourth, this study identifies a recurring veterinary bottleneck at the street-clinic-recovery handover, where limited short-term holding capacity stalls treatment trajectories and displaces recovery labor into precarious domestic and informal spaces. Together, these findings argue that caregiver well-being is not ancillary to animal welfare governance but constitutive of it. It shapes the continuity of monitoring, the timeliness of intervention, and the everyday mediation through which coexistence is maintained under intensified legal and political pressure.