Decellularizing strawberry tissue

I dunno if it's better here or in implant stories, but it's technically not an implant so... 

Last year I came across that thread about decellularizing fruit and vegetable tissue, and have finally worked up the nerve to go through with it. Here are some before and after shots.
 
I made a couple changes to his methodology: instead of using distilled water, I used purified water which didn't seem to negatively affect anything. I also used a 1% SDS stock solution instead of his 0.5%. This also didn't seem to make any noticeable difference, so it's probably better to stick with a 0.5% concentration to conserve material. Something that wasn't mentioned is how ridiculously fragile strawberry extracellular matrices are. After a certain point I had to avoid splashing the strawberries when changing solution, otherwise they would tear. 

I want to keep this scaffold and a few others I have planned for the future around my dorm as decoration, but once I get the proper space and set up for a cell lab, I'd like to try my hand at reseeding scaffolds as well. Bioluminescent hearts anyone?
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Comments

  • Nicely done! :D

    It looks nice and ghosty .3.
  • Oh wow. I should dig up that thread and have a play at it myself at some stage.
  • did this sometime last year experimenting with different lysing agents at a 1/100 soap/water ratio. SDS definitely did the most damage to the scaffolding, tritonx-100 was the most gentle to the scaffolding i'd say (but took long as hell and the strawberry retained a light pink/brown hue even when there was no longer anything being extracted into the solution). suprisingly APS (i used good ol' lemon dish soap, but in later studies should probably try to isolate the chemical) seemed to retain the structure nearly as good as the professional grade decelling lyser and left the strawberry a ghostly white hue.
  • Interesting! I might have to try an APS solution at some point and compare. The scaffold's fragility made it especially hard to handle, so the extra preservation would be extremely beneficial for moving and future reseeding. 
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