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.
I. INTRODUCTIONMany researchers have focused on micro-injection technology which has been proved to be an effective technique introducing foreign materials into cells. This technology can be applied for gene injection, In-vitro fertilisation (IVF), intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), drug development and other biomedical areas notably in cancer treatments [1]. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first report of proposing a material for fabricating an artificial oocyte.Accessing human biological oocyte samples for experimental work is very limited, and therefore having suitable artificial samples that could mimic the natural tissues would help to develop appropriate experimental methodology.Synthetic and natural polymers could be considered for the development of artificial tissues. In 2017 alginate hydrogels were proposed for transplantation of ovarian follicles considering different grafting times [2]. Alginate is one of the proposed materials which has the minimum grafting time that is reported to be one week [3]. Alginate