Bamboo Fibers Elaborating Cellulose Hydrogel Films for Medical Applications

Abstract

Bamboo fibers were used as source to prepare cellulose hydrogel films for cell cultivation scaffold. The preparation of cellulose solutions was carried out by three different dissolving methods with NaOH-based and NaOH/urea aqueous solutions and DMAc/LiCl solution. Several hydrogel films were elaborated and their properties were compared to evaluate the effect of the dissolving method. It was found that tensile strength of the resultant hydrogel films increased from 21 to 66 N/mm2 when DMAc/LiCl was used instead of the NaOH/urea solution. The same tendency was observed in the obtained elongation values. Moreover, a remarkable difference in fibroblast cell cultivation was observed in higher cell density, when DMAc/LiCl method was used. The obtained results with DMAc/LiCl also were seen to be higher than the results for PS dish used as control. However, low cytocompatibility was observed when NaOH and NaOH/urea methods were used. The obtained results showed that hydrogel films elaborated with cellulose solution prepared with DMAc/LiCl method exhibited good cytocompatibility for the cell cultivation scaffold.