{"doi":"10.3390/lymphatics2030015","title":"Characterization of Photo-Crosslinked Methacrylated Type I Collagen as a Platform to Investigate the Lymphatic Endothelial Cell Response","abstract":"Despite chronic fibrosis occurring in many pathological conditions, few in vitro studies examine how fibrosis impacts lymphatic endothelial cell (LEC) behavior. This study examined stiffening profiles of PhotoCol®—commercially available methacrylated type I collagen—photo-crosslinked with the photoinitiators: Lithium phenyl-2,4,6-trimethylbenzoylphosphinate (LAP), Irgacure 2959 (IRG), and Ruthenium/Sodium Persulfate (Ru/SPS) prior to evaluating PhotoCol® permeability and LEC response to PhotoCol® at stiffnesses representing normal and fibrotic tissues. Ru/SPS produced the highest stiffness (~6 kilopascal (kPa)) for photo-crosslinked PhotoCol®, but stiffness did not change with burst light exposures (30 and 90 s). The collagen fibril area fraction increased, and dextran permeability (40 kilodalton (kDa)) decreased with photo-crosslinking, showing the impact of photo-crosslinking on microstructure and molecular transport. Human dermal LECs on softer, uncrosslinked PhotoCol® (~0.5 kPa) appeared smaller with less prominent vascular endothelial (VE)-cadherin (cell–cell junction) expression compared to LECs on stiffer PhotoCol® (~6 kPa), which had increased cell size, border irregularity, and VE-cadherin thickness (junction zippering) that is consistent with LEC morphology in fibrotic tissues. Our quantitative morphological analysis demonstrates our ability to produce LECs with a fibrotic phenotype, and the overall study shows that PhotoCol® with Ru/SPS provides the necessary physical properties to systematically study LEC responses related to capillary growth and function under fibrotic conditions.","journal":"Lymphatics","year":2024,"id":469218,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9598,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":699425,"name":"S. M. Larson","orcid":"0000-0001-6643-6032","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1302962,"name":"Eleni K. Xhupi","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1302584,"name":"Diana L. Herrera-Diaz","orcid":"0000-0002-1767-7451","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1107429,"name":"Catherine F. Whittington","orcid":"0000-0002-5821-4437","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1107892,"name":"Brian N. K. Ruliffson","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":45,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:05:28.027781Z","pmid":"39664172","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}