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The aim of our work was to examine and describe ultrastructure of the agarose hydrogel and any possible structural concentration dependencies, and to assess the distribution and size of pores of agarose hydrogel in dependence on its concentration. Four concentrations were prepared (0.5 %, 1.0 %, 2.0 % and 4.0 % of dry weight content) and cryoSEM and turbidimetry methods were executed on wet (original) samples in order to image the ultrastructure and measure the pore sizes within.Reasonable results were obtained for the wet samples as they were closer to their native state they are usually used for applications in. CryoSEM and turbidimetry provided comparable results of pore diameters and allowed to compare pore diameters dependant on the concentrations; moreover, it showed more detailed and realistic structure.
Keywords: Hydrogel, agarose, cryoSEM, freezing methods, image analysis© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.