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by Keyword: Matrix elasticity
Bril, Maaike, Villacrosa-Ribas, Adria, D'Urso, Mirko, Verbroekken, Ruth M C, Bouten, Carlijn V C, Kurniawan, Nicholas A, (2026). Interplay between viscoelasticity and topography regulates fibroblast mechanoresponse and activation Cell Reports Physical Science 7, 103215 
The extracellular matrix's topographies influence cell behavior and tissue function. Anisotropic topographies promote cell elongation and alignment, while isotropic cues, often found in diseased tissues, induce random cell orientation that may lead to undesirable cell mechanoresponses, such as the persistent activation of fi-broblasts. Viscoelasticity has increasingly been recognized to also affect cell behavior. Yet, understanding the effects of both physiologically relevant cues remains challenging. Here, we address this by using a digital UV-light microsculpting approach to create viscoelastic polyacrylamide hydrogels (elastic modulus = 13 kPa, half relaxation time: T-1/2 = 0.03 s) with various surface topographies (linear or crosshatch similar to 250-nm-high mi-crotopographies), mimicking healthy and diseased microenvironments. By combining viscoelastic and topo-graphical cues in one system, our study reveals a dominant role for substrate viscoelasticity in fibroblast acti-vation. This finding highlights the need to study cell mechanoresponses in multi-cue environments while offering an intriguing role of viscoelasticity in regulating fibroblast phenotype.
JTD Keywords: Differentiation, Health, Hydrogels, Matrix elasticity, Mechanics, Mechanobiology, Stem-cell, Stiffness
