Abstract—Cell injection to introduce a foreign material in biological cells is currently an important area of research. Intervention with biological cells such as an oocyte poses a major limitation towards understanding their biomechanical behaviour, especially during injection, which could result in significant and undesirable deformation of the outer membrane. In this paper, a cross-linked alginate hydrogel is proposed as a material to develop an artificial oocyte to simulate the mechanical properties of a natural human oocyte and use it for mechanical analysis and modelling. A mechanical model and finite element analysis are first presented. The relationship between the injection force and the mechanical properties of the gel are then studied and presented. To validate the mechanical model, experiments were performed using different diameters of an oocyte made using the proposed hydrogel, showing that the modelling results satisfy the experimental demands and that this model can be used to estimate the mechanical properties of other gels too.
Index Terms—Artificial oocyte, alginate, hydrogel, finite element model, deformation.
A. M. Hajiyavand and M. Saadat are with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom (e-mail: axh047@bham.ac.uk, m.saadat@bham.ac.uk).
A. Stamboulis is with the School of Metallurgy and Materials, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom (e-mail: a.stamboulis@bham.ac.uk).
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Cite: Amir M. Hajiyavand, Mozafar Saadat, and Artemis Stamboulis, "A Mechanical Model for an Artificial Oocyte," International Journal of Modeling and Optimization vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 315-321, 2017.
