188 Chapter 8 Figure 1: Schematic representation of the methodology. A) Porcine lung ECM hydrogel preparation. Porcine lungs were blended, decellularized and freeze-dried before grinding to a fine powder. Afterwards, the ECM powder was pepsin digested to prepare the pre-gel solution which can form hydrogels after incubating at 37°C. B) Fibre crosslinking of porcine lung ECM hydrogels. Lung derived-ECM (LdECM) hydrogels were used as is or mixed with ruthenium and sodium persulfate solutions before casting to 48-well plates. Afterwards, the pre-gel solutions were incubated at 37°C and UV-crosslinked. C) Mechanical characterization of the uncrosslinked and ruthenium crosslinked ECM hydrogels. Low Load Compression Tester (LLCT) was used to determine the stiffness and stress relaxation of LdECM and Ru-LdECM hydrogels. The stress relaxation was modelled with a Maxwell elements system, and a chi2 analysis was used to determine the number of Maxwell elements to fit the measured relaxation. Figure created with BioRender.
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