Assessing The Changes In Mechanical Properties of Different Gellan Gum Hydrogels Under Tissue Engineering Conditions

Abstract

Regenerative medicine (RM) and tissue engineering (TE) use data and technology from several domains to replace or repair damaged organs and tissues for therapeutic purposes. In order to do this, scaffolds serve as cellular systems or delivery vehicles for medications. This allows cellular

material to properly colonize host cells to satisfy the needs of regeneration and repair. The neo-tissue or organ that is required must be created through a multi-stage procedure that involves the creation of several components. Biomaterials are crucial components of many modern TE techniques. Even though a number of polymers have been proven to work as biomaterials, choosing the right polymer for a particular application requires thorough consideration of the cellular environment and interactions necessary. Hydrogels are promising scaffold candidates, Scaffold materials can be synthetic or natural depending on this. In this review, an overview of natural occurring polysaccharide Gellan Gum (GG) serves as the hydrogel's primary negatively charged component, crosslinked as GG/Ca (calcium) and GG/SPD (spermidine) through mild ionotropic gelation approach to create these physical hydrogels which is in the ratio of 5:1. We investigated the changes in their mechanical properties through indentation test protocol by determine their equilibrium and instantaneous modulus across the period of incubation (28 days) so see which of the hydrogel will be more appropriate for use in TE. However, due to our statistical evaluation of data, we discovered that the difference due to changes between the two hydrogels in tissue

engineering condition over the duration of incubation for indentation test were negligible, P >0.05, which means that it is non statistically significant put into consideration, nevertheless, the equilibrium modulus validated the hydrogels mechanical properties which include optimizing scaffold stiffness, long term stability, mimicking native tissue properties, functional integrity and biomechanical compatibility etc.

Equilibrium modulus is a crucial mechanical property that provides information about the stiffness, elastic response, and long-term behavior of a material under stress. It is particularly valuable in understanding how materials behave in equilibrium conditions, as revealed by the data we got by

averaging the raw data, which include 0.0014 Mpa for GG/Ca and 0.0015 Mpa for GG/SPD in day 1 of the measurement and similar values across the incubation periods.

Keywords

Gellan Gum (GG); calcium (Ca); spermidine (SPD); mechanical properties; equilibrium  modulus; instantaneous modulus; hydrogel; crosslinker;