Simple yet effective methods to probe hydrogel stiffness for mechanobiology.

ABSTRACT: In spite of tremendous advances made in the comprehension of mechanotransduction, implementation of mechanobiology assays remains challenging for the broad community of cell biologists. Hydrogel substrates with tunable stiffness are essential tool in mechanobiology, allowing to investigate the effects of mechanical signals on cell behavior. A bottleneck that slows down the popularization of hydrogel formulations for mechanobiology is the assessment of their stiffness, typically requiring expensive and sophisticated methodologies in the domain of material science. Here we overcome such barriers offering the reader protocols to set-up and interpret two straightforward, low cost and high-throughput tools to measure hydrogel stiffness: static macroindentation and micropipette aspiration. We ad

SUBMITTER: Gandin A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8608946 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature