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Full-Text Articles in Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology
Promoting Extracellular Matrix Crosslinking In Synthetic Hydrogels, Marcos M. Manganare
Promoting Extracellular Matrix Crosslinking In Synthetic Hydrogels, Marcos M. Manganare
Masters Theses
The extracellular matrix (ECM) provides mechanical and biochemical support to tissues and cells. It is crucial for cell attachment, differentiation, and migration, as well as for ailment-associated processes such as angiogenesis, metastases and cancer development. An approach to study these phenomena is through emulation of the ECM by synthetic gels constructed of natural polymers, such as collagen and fibronectin, or simple but tunable materials such as poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) crosslinked with short peptide sequences susceptible to digestion by metalloproteases and cell-binding domains. Our lab uses PEG gels to study cell behavior in three dimensions (3D). Although this system fosters cell …
Viewing The Extracellular Matrix: An Imaging Method For Tissue Engineering, Michael Drakopoulos, Sarah Calve
Viewing The Extracellular Matrix: An Imaging Method For Tissue Engineering, Michael Drakopoulos, Sarah Calve
The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium
The field of regenerative medicine seeks to create replacement tissues and organs, both to repair deficiencies in biological function and to treat structural damage caused by injury. Scaffoldings mimicking extracellular matrix (ECM), the structure to which cells attach to form tissues, have been developed from synthetic polymers and also been prepared by decellularizing adult tissue. However, the structure of ECM undergoes significant remodeling during natural tissue repair, suggesting that ECM-replacement constructs that mirror developing tissues may promote better regeneration than those modeled on adult tissues. This work investigated the effectiveness of a method of viewing the extracellular matrix of developing …