Developing Decellularized Plant-Based Biomaterials

Presenter

Mahidhar Sai Lakkavaram

Campus

UMass Amherst

Sponsor

Shelly Peyton, Department of Chemical Engineering, UMass Amherst

Schedule

Session 5, 3:30 PM - 4:15 PM [Schedule by Time][Poster Grid for Time/Location]

Location

Poster Board C37, Poster Showcase Room (163), Row 4 (C31-C40) [Poster Location Map]

Abstract

The past decade has seen developments in research surrounding top-down composition methods for tissue engineering, which take advantage of existing structures found in nature to model and grow new human tissues. This can be advantageous to many potential medical applications, including for artificial organs and tissues, implanted drug housing to internally deliver medications to patients, drug testing, personalized medicine, and others. Top-down composition using animal tissues is done by removing cellular material from the animal organ to regrow human cell cultures onto and provide replacement organs. Only more recently have plant tissues been more heavily explored for the same use.

This research aims to develop a more standardized method of decellularizing, confirming acellularity of, and recellularizing plant tissue scaffolds for top-down tissue engineering. Many methods of top-down tissue engineering exist, with little standardization between them and little consensus over which are most and least successful. In this research, varying concentrations of sodium dodecyl sulfate, a chemical detergent used for decellularization studies, and household bleach, a common decellularization technique, will be used on varying types of plant tissues to investigate which combination yields the least cellularity of the scaffold. Cell seeding techniques will also be explored for a variety of plants, in addition to mechanical tests and decellularization quantification methodologies, like DNA assays and grayscale measurements. 

Keywords

Biomaterials, Regenerative Medicine, Tissue Engineering, Plant Biology, Mechanical Testing

Research Area

Chemistry and Materials Science

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