In vitro fabricated biological tissue would be a valuable tool to screen newly synthesized drugs or understand the tissue development process. However, controlling the growth and morphology of the fabricated tissue remains a challenge. Therefore, new techniques are required. Here we report a simple method to modify the surface of an ex-vivo culture substrate using unmodified chitosan solution. The effect of chitosan coating on the tissue culture plate and alginate hydrogel was evaluated. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT/IR), results demonstrated that there are no crosslinking reactions presents between chitosan and alginate. Data obtained from the in vitro study demonstrated the increase in the cell adhesion, proliferation and growth potential of the 0.3% chitosan-coated sample. In addition, when an isolated submandibular gland (SMG) was cultured on a 0.3% chitosan-coated alginate hydrogel sheet, SMG growth including bud expansion, and neural innervation was dramatically enhanced. This study is important for the assessment and design of surfaces for ex-vivo culture-based tissue engineering and it is possible to control the cell behavior by changing the chitosan concentration and employing fairly fast and reproducible simple coating technique. This also helps to design the new chitosan-based materials for different biological applications in the field of tissue engineering. (C) The Author(s) 2019. Published by ECS.