A clamp-free micro-stretching system for evaluating the viscoelastic response of cell-laden microfibers.
Biosens Bioelectron
; 214: 114517, 2022 Oct 15.
Article
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| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35803154
ABSTRACT
Viscoelastic hydrogel microfibers have extensive applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, however, their viscoelasticity is still difficult to be directly characterized because microfiber-specific measuring system is lacking for quantitative studies. In this paper, we develop a two-probe micro-stretching system to quantitatively investigate viscoelasticity of the microfiber by evaluating the storage and loss modulus E' and Eâ³. A liquid bridge-based fixation method enables single microfiber to be easily fixed to be stably stretched by a two-probe actuator. Afterward, multi-frequency stretching force loading is automatically implemented based on real-time force control, and the resulting stress and strain in the frequency spectrum are measured to evaluate the E' and Eâ³ of pure GelMA, alginate-GelMA composite and GelMA core-alginate shell microfibers. The measured E' and Eâ³ are verified by the response of NIH/3T3 fibroblast cells to the composite microfibers with different alginate concentrations. Moreover, benefiting from the low-damaged stretching process, our system can also detect the difference of the E' and Eâ³ between two cellular processes including growth and differentiation of the aligned mesenchymal stem cells in the same one core-shell microfiber. These results all show that our proposed system provides a valuable reference tool for biomaterials design, the study of cell-matrix interaction and disease etiology from the perspective of mechanics.
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MEDLINE
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Técnicas Biosensibles
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En
Año:
2022
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Article