Tendon injuries heal as scar tissue with significant dysfunction and propensity to re-injure, motivating efforts to develop stem cell-based therapies for tendon regeneration. For these therapies to succeed, effective cues to guide tenogenesis are needed. Our aim is to identify these cues within the embryonic tendon microenvironment. We recently demonstrated embryonic tendon elastic modulus increases during development and is substantially lower than in adult. Here, we examined how these embryonic mechanical properties influence tenogenically differentiating cells, by culturing embryonic tendon progenitor cells (TPCs) within alginate gel scaffolds fabricated with embryonic tendon mechanical properties. We showed that nano- and microscale moduli of RGD-functionalized alginate gels can be tailored to that of embryonic tendons by adjusting polymer concentration and crosslink density. These gels differentially regulated morphology of encapsulated TPCs as a function of initial elastic modulus. Additionally, higher initial elastic moduli elicited higher mRNA levels of scleraxis and collagen type XII but lower levels of collagen type I, whereas late tendon markers tenomodulin and collagen type III were unaffected. Our results demonstrate the potential to engineer scaffolds with embryonic mechanical properties and to use these scaffolds to regulate the behavior of tenogenically differentiating cells.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 20 May 2025.
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#8,534,528
of 25,373,627 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Biomechanics
#2,181
of 5,356 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#127,035
of 355,527 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Biomechanics
#17
of 47 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,373,627 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 43rd percentile – i.e., 43% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 5,356 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 6.0. This one is in the 36th percentile – i.e., 36% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 47 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 61% of its contemporaries.
