The effect of preparation pH on the swelling of alginate/gelatin
mixture beads is shown in Fig. 3. For pH 10.5 and 7, the mixture
beads had almost the same swelling profile. However, with the
preparation pH decreasing to 4 and 3.5, the swelling kinetics was
significantly slowed down, and the equilibrium swelling ratio was
also reduced. Compared with the mixture gel beads, the swelling
of control beads had little dependence on preparation pH (data not
shown).