Journal
BIOMACROMOLECULES
Volume 14, Issue 7, Pages 2294-2304Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/bm400418g
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Funding
- University of Massachusetts Amherst
- National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center on Polymers at UMass [DMR-0820506]
- Barry and Afsaneh Siadat Career Development Award
- Institute of Cellular Engineering IGERT at UMass
- National Science Foundation
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We report here the synthesis of a new class of hydrogels with an extremely wide range of mechanical properties suitable for cell studies. Mechanobiology has emerged as an important field in bioengineering, in part due to the development of synthetic polymer gels and fibrous protein biomaterials to control and quantify how cells sense and respond to mechanical forces in their microenvironment. To address the problem of limited availability of biomaterials, in terms of both mechanical range and optical clarity, we have prepared hydrogels that combine poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) and phosphorylcholine (PC) zwitterions. Our goal was to create a hyrogel platform that exceeds the range of Young's moduli reported for similar hydrogels, while being simple to synthesize and manipulate. The Young's modulus of these PEG-PC hydrogels can be tuned over 4 orders of magnitude, much greater than commonly used hydrogels such as PEG-diacrylate, PEG-dimethacrylate, and polyacrylamide, with smaller average mesh sizes and optical clarity. We prepared PEG-PC hydrogels to study how substrate mechanical properties influence cell morphology, focal adhesion structure, and proliferation across multiple mammalian cell lines, as a proof of concept. These novel PEG-PC biomaterials represent a new and useful class of mechanically tunable hydrogels for mechanobiology.
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