UC Berkeley

The dissertation research focused on exploring relationships between composition, structure, and mechanical properties in hydrogels used for tissue engineering application. Specifically, these series of separate but related studies focused on agarose-based gels and co-gels, looking at how different concentrations of agarose, alginate, and collagen affected their ability to serve as a tissue-engineering scaffold with appropriate manufacturability, compressive mechanical properties, and extra-cellular matrix production of embedded cells. These relationships between composition and structure add to the growing literature of tissue-engineering scaffolds, and help researchers move closer towards functional repair of damaged tissues. The main results of this work identified agarose-alginate co-gels as a suitable candidate for bioprinting tissue engineering scaffolds. Later, it was observed that crosslinking agarose-alginate gels changes the short-term recovery behavior under unconfined compression, and increases elastic mechanical properties. This dissertation work also observed that methods used to quantify collagen content from commercial collagen type I gels vary by species source, and that combining these collagen gels in an agarose-based cell-embedded scaffolds produces a minimal, dose-dependent effect on matrix production and compressive mechanics. In short, the dissertation has expanded on the known literature of agarose co-gel mechanics under different loading scenarios. It is my hope that researchers will use the relationships between matrix production, initial gel content, and compressive and shear mechanics to continue improving the functionality of tissue engineered constructs.