Tag Archives: agarose

Optical fibers made from marine algae

Apparently after you’ve finished imaging with your marine algae-based optical fibers, you can eat them. A July 24, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces the new research,

An optical fiber made of agar has been produced at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. This device is edible, biocompatible and biodegradable. It can be used in vivo for body structure imaging, localized light delivery in phototherapy or optogenetics (e.g., stimulating neurons with light to study neural circuits in a living brain), and localized drug delivery.

Another possible application is the detection of microorganisms in specific organs, in which case the probe would be completely absorbed by the body after performing its function.

Caption: Edible, biocompatible and biodegradable, these fibers have potential for various medical applications. Credit: Eric Fujiwara

A July 24, 2020 Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa dFundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) do Estado de São Paulo press release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, provides a few more details about the researches and the work,

The research project, which was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP, was led by Eric Fujiwara, a professor in UNICAMP’s School of Mechanical Engineering, and Cristiano Cordeiro, a professor in UNICAMP’s Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics, in collaboration with Hiromasa Oku, a professor at Gunma University in Japan.

An article on the study is published) in Scientific Reports, an online journal owned by Springer Nature.

Agar, also called agar-agar, is a natural gelatin obtained from marine algae. Its composition consists of a mixture of two polysaccharides, agarose and agaropectin. “Our optical fiber is an agar cylinder with an external diameter of 2.5 millimeters [mm] and a regular inner arrangement of six 0.5 mm cylindrical airholes around a solid core. Light is confined owing to the difference between the refraction indices of the agar core and the airholes,” Fujiwara told.

“To produce the fiber, we poured food-grade agar into a mold with six internal rods placed lengthwise around the main axis,” he continued. “The gel distributes itself to fill the available space. After cooling, the rods are removed to form airholes, and the solidified waveguide is released from the mold. The refraction index and geometry of the fiber can be adapted by varying the composition of the agar solution and mold design, respectively.”

The researchers tested the fiber in different media, from air and water to ethanol and acetone, concluding that it is context-sensitive. “The fact that the gel undergoes structural changes in response to variations in temperature, humidity and pH makes the fiber suitable for optical sensing,” Fujiwara said.

Another promising application is its simultaneous use as an optical sensor and a growth medium for microorganisms. “In this case, the waveguide can be designed as a disposable sample unit containing the necessary nutrients. The immobilized cells in the device would be optically sensed, and the signal would be analyzed using a camera or spectrometer,” he said.

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About São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)

The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at http://www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at http://www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe.

As per my usual practice, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Agarose-based structured optical fibre by Eric Fujiwara, Thiago D. Cabral, Miko Sato, Hiromasa Oku & Cristiano M. B. Cordeiro. Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 7035 (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64103-3 Published: 27 April 2020

This paper is open access.

Should you have a problem accessing the English language version of the FAPESP website, the Portuguese language version of the site seems more accessible (assuming you have the language skills).

Combining chitosan, agarose, and protein gelatine with clay nanotubes to create scaffolds for tissue engineering

Russian scientists have published work on clay nanotube-bipolymer composite scaffolds according to an April 29, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

Scientists combined three biopolymers, chitosan and agarose (polysaccharides), and a protein gelatine, as the materials to produce tissue engineering scaffolds and demonstrated the enhancement of mechanical strength (doubled pick load), higher water uptake and thermal properties in chitosan-gelatine-agarose hydrogels doped with halloysite [a clay mineral and a naturally occurring nanotube].

An April 29, 2016 Kazan Federal University (Russia) press release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, provides more detail and context,

The fabrication of a prototype tissue having functional properties close to the natural ones is crucial for effective transplantation. Tissue engineering scaffolds are typically used as supports which allow cells to form tissue-like structures essentially required for the correct functioning of the cells under the conditions close to the three-dimensional tissue.

Chitosan, a natural biodegradable and chemically versatile biopolymer, has been effectively used in antibacterial, antifungal, anti-tumour and immunostimulating formulations. To overcome the disadvantages of pure chitosan scaffolds such as mechanical fragility and low biological resistance, chitosan scaffolds are typically doped with other supporting compounds which allow for mechanical strengthening, thus yielding ?omposite biologically resistant scaffolds.

Agarose is a galactose-based backbone polysaccharide isolated from red algae, having remarkable mechanical properties which are useful in the design of tissue engineering scaffolds.

Gelatine is formed from collagen by hydrolysis (breaking the triple-helix structure into single-strand molecules) and has a number of advantages over its precursor. It is less immunogenic compared with collagen and it retains informational signal sequences promoting cell adhesion, migration, differentiation and proliferation.

The surface irregularities of the scaffold pores due to the insoluble nanosized components promote the best adhesion of the cells on scaffold materials, while the nanoparticle fillers increase the composites’ strength. Thus, researchers doped halloysite nanotubes into a chitosan-agarose-gelatine matrix to design the implantable 3D cell scaffolds.

The resulting scaffolds demonstrate the shape memory upon deformation and have the porous structure suitable for cell adhesion and proliferation which is essential for artificial tissue fabrication. Macroscopic observations have confirmed that all the samples of scaffolds exhibited the sponge-like behaviour with the shape memory and shape reconstitution after deformation both in wet and dry states.

The swelling experiments indicated that the addition of halloysite can greatly improve the hydrophilicity and wetting of composite scaffolds. The incorporation of halloysite nanotubes into the scaffolds increases the water uptake and subsequently improves the biocompatibility. The intrinsic properties of halloysite nanotubes can be used for further improving the biocompatibility of scaffolds by the loading and sustained release of different bioactive compounds. This opens the prospect for fabrication of scaffolds with defined properties for directed differentiation of cells on matrixes due to gradual release of differentiation factors.

Experiments on two types of human cancer cells (A549 and Hep3B) show that in vitro cell adhesion and proliferation on the nanocomposites occur without changes in viability and cytoskeleton formation.

Further in vivo biocompatibility and biodegradability evaluation in rats has confirmed that the scaffolds promote the formation of novel blood vessels around the implantation sites. The scaffolds show excellent resorption within six weeks after implantation in rats. Neo-vascularization observed in newly formed connective tissue placed near the scaffold allows for the complete restoration of blood flow.

The results obtained indicate that the halloysite doped scaffolds are biocompatible as demonstrated both in vitro and in vivo. In addition, they confirm the great potential of chitosan-agarose-gelatine nanocomposite porous scaffolds doped with halloysite in tissue engineering with potential for sustained nanotube drug delivery.

For anyone interested about drug delivery and nanoparticles, there’s some interesting research profiled in my April 27, 2016 posting which describes how very few nanoparticles are actually delivered to specific sites.

Getting back to the regular program, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper on scaffolds and clay nanotubes,

Clay nanotube–biopolymer composite scaffolds for tissue engineering by Ekaterina A. Naumenko, Ivan D. Guryanov, Raghuvara Yendluri, Yuri M. Lvova, and Rawil F. Fakhrullin. Nanoscale, 2016,8, 7257-7271 DOI: 10.1039/C6NR00641H First published online 01 Mar 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.