Fig 1.
The effects of temperature on collagen alignment.
(A) Representative confocal reflectance images. (B) Pseudo-color confocal reflectance images depicting fiber orientations. The 0° mark indicates the direction the beads were pulled to induce alignment. (C) Representative histograms depicting fiber orientation distributions generated from the OrientationJ plugin in ImageJ. (D) Quantifications of the collagen alignment via 2 methods: aspect ratio and orientation index. N = 6–7; n = 36–42. Data presented as mean ± s.d.
Fig 2.
The effects of collagen alignment at different temperatures on pore size.
(A) Representative confocal reflectance images of aligned & random collagen gels gelled at 25°C and 37°C. Cropped and magnified images are included to the right of the images. Scale bars = 50 μm. Collagen pore size quantified by autocorrelation methods (B) and erosion-based methods (C). N = 6–7; n = 36–42. Data presented as mean ± s.d. (D) Erosion-based quantification process. Representative confocal reflectance image of collagen architecture is transformed into a skeletonized binary image with black pixels depicting fibers. Pores are produced by erosion of the skeletonized binary image.
Fig 3.
Mechanical properties of aligned and random collagen matrices at different temperatures.
(A) Equilibrium modulus of gels measured by confined compression. Data presented as mean ± SEM. N = 8–16; n = 8–16. (B) Young’s modulus of gels measured by AFM. Data presented as median ± interquartile range (box), 10th-90th percentile (whiskers), and mean (+) with outliers represented as points. N = 4; n = 335–379.