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Structural and mechanical analysis of collagen gels

Kamal Tripathi, Julia Romero Bhathal, Mehdi Bouzid, Lucie Bailly, Claude Verdier, Valérie M. Laurent

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Kamal Tripathi, Julia Romero Bhathal, Mehdi Bouzid, Lucie Bailly, Claude Verdier, et al. Structural and mechanical analysis of collagen gels. GFR 2024 – 60ième anniversaire du Groupe Français de Rhéologie, Oct 2024, Marseille, France. hal-04911570v2

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https://hal.science/hal-04911570v2

Submitted on 21 Nov 2025

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Structural and mechanical analysis of collagen gels

Kamal Tripathi<sup>1,2,*</sup>, Julia Romero Bhathal<sup>1,2</sup>, Mehdi Bouzid<sup>1</sup>, Lucie Bailly<sup>1</sup>,
Claude Verdier<sup>2</sup>, Valérie M. Laurent<sup>2</sup>

(1) Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, 3SR, Grenoble, France,

(2) Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Liphy, Grenoble, France;

* kamal.tripathi@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

**Keywords:** collagen network, gel, microstructure, simulations

**Abstract:** The complex interaction between cancer cells and their microenvironment plays an essential role in tumor progression and metastasis. Collagen appears as a key structural component of the extracellular matrix (ECM) that interacts and influences cells and their behavior, including migration. Understanding the link between the microstructure and the mechanical properties of the collagen fibrous gels would be a major step toward comprehending cancer cell interplay with the matrix. We experimentally investigate the influence of different physico-chemical parameters such as temperature, collagen concentration and pH on the gel structure. From confocal microscopy we infer several structural descriptors to characterize the gels morphology, through the pore size distribution, the fiber thickness and volume fraction.

This catalogue of gels microstructure is rationalized through coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations of a model gel system that incorporate simple but enough ingredient to capture several structural features of collagen networks formation.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: A typical network structure from a simulated system at 1 % particle volume fraction.</figcaption></figure>