Mechanical properties of collagen gels and flow problems in kidney's basement membranes

Prateek Verma / 01 September 2009

polymers materials tissue engineering modeling computational

Several diseases stem from the malfunctioning of kidney's basement membranes. Collagen type IV is the main component of these membranes. We synthesized some acellular collagen gels in lab and measured their mechanical properties using the Nano-indentation technique. It uses a small tip that pokes a surface and measures the mechanical properties of the material by measuring the force experienced by the tip as a function of poking, or time, and depth of penetration. Nano-indentation is useful for soft materials like gels and tissues because it is sensitive to very small amounts of force which is all that is required to deform such materials. Think about how you can make contact lenses if you can't even measure the flexibility and the softness of the lens material!

In a dependent parallel project, computational models of basement membranes from collagen fibers were produced. These digital images were then converted into a real epoxy network which would subsequently be used to study the flow-problems in an experimental setup.