Good morning,
I am currently working on hepatocytes encapsulation in alginate microbeads for bioartificial liver applications. Since in certain cases I have problems of alginate degelification and cell leakage from the microbeads, I was wondering if there is an easy technique in order to create a surface coating on microbeads to avoid cell leakage.
I have read about layer-by-layer approaches using poly-L- ornithine (PLO) or poly-L-lysine (PLL). But I would like to know if some of you have already tried other techniques on alginate encapsulated hepatocytes.
Thank you for your attention,
Mattia
Dear Mattia,
I don´t know how you prepare your alginate microbeads. In any way, alginate is a polycationic polysaccharide, so, you can try to coat your microbeads with some polycationic polymer (chitosan, eudragit, among others). Another possibility is to crosslinking the microbeads using some crosslinking agent (take care with toxicity). Regards.
You can use chitosan for coating of your particles.
firstly suspending your beads in an aqous solution containing chitosan, then change the pH by sod. Hydroxide to elevate the pH to about 9. Chitosan will coacervate around the beads.
I don't know how do you prepare your alginate microbeads, but from my experience encapsulator Buchi Pro is a pretty useful technique to prepare stable and dense biopolymeric microbeads. From what you've mentioned, It seems your beads are not stables enough, you can check whether the calcium chloride concentration, crosslinking time or alginate concentration are affecting your microbeads stability.
As Mazin said, you can use chitosan as a coating agent, by dropping your microbeads in a chitosan solution, which will create a chitosan layer around the microbeads. For better stability, you can cross-link the chitosan layer with TPP (tripolyphosphate).
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