Hyaluronic acid (HA) is a major component of cartilage extracellular matrix and is an attractive material for use as 3D injectable matrices for cartilage regeneration. While previous studies have shown the promise of HA-based hydrogels to support cell-based cartilage formation, varying HA concentration generally led to simultaneous changes in both biochemical cues and stiffness. How cells respo...

Combining several materials (“phases”) into a composite material permits creation of new materials with tunable overall response, e.g., elastic properties, which can be related to the elastic moduli, arrangement, and concentrations of the composite’s phases. A recent advance predicts use of one phase having correctly tuned non-positive-definite elastic moduli (i.e., negative stiffness) in a two...

Cells in the body exist in a dynamic mechanical environment where they are subject to mechanical stretch as well as changes in composition and stiffness of the underlying extracellular matrix (ECM). However, the underlying mechanisms by which cells sense and adapt to their dynamic mechanical environment, in particular to stretch, are not well understood. In this study, we hypothesized that emer...

Stem cell differentiation can be highly sensitive to mechanical inputs from the extracellular matrix (ECM). Identifying temporal windows during which lineage commitment responds to ECM stiffness, and the signals that mediate these decisions, would advance both mechanistic insights and translational efforts. To address these questions, we investigate adult neural stem cell (NSC) fate commitment ...

A generalised method for the identification of the parameters which describe the dynamic properties of media between coupled substructures using measured FRFs is presented in this paper. The effort is mainly focused on the development of this generalised method and the improvement of its constituent algorithms. The method presented here is more general and more practical in some aspects when co...