Vascular smooth muscle cells can be circumferentially aligned inside a channel using tunable gelatin microribbons.

ABSTRACT: The gold standard to measure arterial health is vasodilation in response to nitric oxide. Vasodilation is generally measured via pressure myography of arteries isolated from animal models. However, animal arteries can be difficult to obtain and may have limited relevance to human physiology. It is, therefore, critical to engineer human cell-based arterial models capable of contraction. Vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) must be circumferentially aligned around the vessel lumen to contract the vessel, which is challenging to achieve in a soft blood vessel model. In this study, we used gelatin microribbons to circumferentially align SMCs inside a hydrogel channel. To accomplish this, we created tunable gelatin microribbons of varying stiffnesses and thicknesses and assessed how SMCs aligned

SUBMITTER: Mastoor Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11583946 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature