Bone exhibits positive form birefringence dominated by and dependent upon the orientation of its collagen. The biomechanical efficacy of bone as a tissue is largely determined by collagen fibers of preferred orientation and distribution (and corresponding orientation of mineral crystallites), and evidence is accumulating to demonstrate that this efficacy extends to function at the organ level. ...

Cells are strongly influenced by the local structure and mechanics of the extracellular matrix (ECM). We recently showed that adding agarose to soft collagen ECMs can mechanically stiffen these hydrogels by two orders of magnitude while limiting 3D cell motility, which we speculated might derive from agarose-mediated inhibition of collagen fiber deformation and remodeling. Here, we directly add...

We describe a robust method for determining morphological properties of filamentous biopolymer networks, such as collagen or other connective tissue matrices, from confocal microscopy image stacks. Morphological properties including pore size distributions and percolation thresholds are important for transport processes, e.g., particle diffusion or cell migration through the extracellular matri...

This work presents an optospectroscopic characterization technique for soft tissue microstructure using site-matched confocal Raman microspectroscopy and polarized light microscopy. Using the technique, the microstructure of soft tissue samples is directly observed by polarized light microscopy during loading while spatially correlated spectroscopic information is extracted from the same plane,...

Many pathophysiological phenomena are associated with soft tissue loading that does not produce visible damage or tissue failure. As such, there is an unexplained disconnect between tissue injury and detectable structural damage during loading. This study investigated the collagen fiber kinematics of the rat facet capsular ligament to identify the onset of subfailure damage during tensile loadi...

Accurate staging of liver fibrosis is crucial to guide therapeutic decisions for patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Digital image analysis has emerged as a promising tool for quantitative assessment of fibrosis in chronic liver diseases. We sought to determine the relationship of histologic fibrosis stage with fiber amounts quantified in liver biopsy specimens for the bette...

A new constitutive equation is presented to describe the damage evolution process in parallel-fibered collagenous tissues such as ligaments. The model is formulated by accounting for the fibrous structure of the tissues. The tissue’s stress is defined as the average of the collagen fiber’s stresses. The fibers are

Graphical Abstract Schema of biomass-derived fiber materials (cellulose, chitin, alginate, silk fibroin, collagen, hyaluronic acid, etc.,) for biomedical applications, such as antibacterial skin-wound dressings, tissue engineering, and drug delivery.

Multiphoton microscopy (MPM) holds promise as a noninvasive imaging technique for characterizing collagen structure, and thus mechanical properties, through imaging second harmonic generation (SHG) and two-photon fluorescence in engineered and real connective tissues. Controlling polymerization pH to manipulate collagen gel microstructure, we quantified pore and fiber dimensions using both stan...