I am designing experiments to measure contractile forces of endothelial cells in response to certain stimuli. To start I have been reading a lot about Traction Force Microscopy (TFM) and noticed that many groups use polyacrylamide gels with a Young's Modulus (YM) between 1-100KPa (according to most of them this is the physiological relevant range). However, when I look for experimental data on the stiffness of Basal Membranes (BM), values are around 0.9-3MPa. In addition, I did find the stiffness of multiple types of cells also to be around 1-100KPa.

In the case of endothelial cells, these are monolayers that are attached to a basal lamina in-vivo, forming blood vessels; if we want to reproduce this setup in-vitro I think we would need a substrate of a similar stiffness as the BM. However, this is not what most people do, am I missing something here? Is it technically impossible to make polyacrylamide with a Young's modulus around 1MPa?