Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Culture on Polyvinyl Alcohol-Co-Itaconic Acid Hydrogels with Varying Stiffness Under Xeno-Free ConditionsTzu-Cheng Sung *1, Hsing-Fen Li *1, Akon Higuchi 1,2, Qing-Dong Ling 3,4, Jia-Sin Yang 1, Yeh-Chia Tseng 1, Chih-Hsien Pan Pan 1, Abdullah A. Alarfaj 2, Murugan A. Munusamy 2, Suresh Kumar 5, Shih-Tien Hsu 6, Kadarkarai Murugan 7,8
1Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, National Central University, 2Department of Botany and Microbiology, King Saud University, 3Cathay Medical Research Institute, Cathay General Hospital, 4Graduate Institute of Systems Biology and Bioinformatics, National Central University, 5Department of Medical Microbiology and Parasitology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 6Department of Internal Medicine, Taiwan Landseed Hospital, 7Department of Zoology, Bharathiar University, 8Thiruvalluvar University
A protocol is presented to prepare polyvinyl alcohol-co-itaconic acid hydrogels with varying stiffness, which were grafted with and without oligopeptides, to investigate the effect of the stiffness of biomaterials on the differentiation and proliferation of stem cells. The stiffness of the hydrogels was controlled by the crosslinking time.
