Effect Of Gelatin-based Conductive Composite Hydrogels On Myocardial Cells

Cardiovascular disease has been a severe threat to human life in the world.Meanwhile,in the development of new drugs,cardiotoxicity is the main obstacle to the clinical transformation.The most inspective way to conduct drug screening is to construct and utilize functional cardiac tissue in vitro through Tissue Engineering technology Therefore,to obtain a tissue in-vitro that has a similar natural extracellular environment and can promote the maturation of cardiomyocytes,will be the primary factor for selecting the scaffold materials.Gelatin(Gel)was selected as the basic hydrogel materials as the growth substrate of cardiomyocytes Then,Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)(PEDDT)and water dispersive gold nanowires(AuNWs)were introduced respectively to obtain Gel-PEDOT and Gel-AuNWs hybrid conductive hydrogels.B ecause of its good cytocompatibility,genipin was selected as the rosslinker to form the hydrogels.Then we explored both these two materials’ effects on the growth behavior of cardiomyocytes.The results showed that the introduction of PEDDT and AuNWs can both effectively improve the mechanical properties of gelatin-based hydrogels and achieved the suitable Young’s modulus for cardiomyocytes.Besides,both these two materials can greatly improve the conductivity of the hydrogels.By observing and immunostaining of the neonatal rat cardiomyocytes cultured on hybrid hydrogel substrates,the cell growth,adhesion,beating rate,protein expression,and sarcomere arrangement were analyzed.Rat cardiomyocytes grown on hydrogel substrates were also electrically stimulated.The results showed that the hydrogels prepared in this study could both effectively promote the maturation,the synchronized rhythmic beating and the expression of cardiac-specific proteins in neonatal rat cardiomyocytes.In addition,cardiomyocytes grown on Gel-PEDOT hydrogel substrates exhibit higher beating velocity under the same electrical stimulation conditions.