“…Detection of these shifts in cellular behavior are easier in gradient samples than in DOE and arrays due to reduced sample preparation, which limits sample variation effect on the biological results. Due to the ease and flexibility of fabrication, a number of studies have utilized gradient hydrogel systems to examine the effect of material property changes spanning from studies of Young's modulus [11,66,70,83,92,96,97,99,101,[104][105][106] to bioactive signal concentration [19,22,[76][77][78][79]90,94,95,100,102,107] on cellular behavior with numerous cell types. Large changes in hydrogel stiffness have been shown to affect the lineage choice of stem cells and cellular proliferation [108].…”