A microscale anisotropic biaxial cell stretching device for applications in mechanobiology

Dominique Tremblay,Andrew E Pelling,Sophie Chagnon-Lessard,Maryam Mirzaei,Michel Godin

doi:10.1007/s10529-013-1381-5

Dominique Tremblay, Andrew E Pelling + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10529-013-1381-5

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Abstract

A multi-layered polydimethylsiloxane microfluidic device with an integrated suspended membrane has been fabricated that allows dynamic and multi-axial mechanical deformation and simultaneous live-cell microscopy imaging. The transparent membrane’s strain field can be controlled independently along two orthogonal directions. Human foreskin fibroblasts were immobilized on the membrane’s surface and stretched along two orthogonal directions sequentially while performing live-cell imaging. Cyclic deformation of the cells induced a reversible reorientation perpendicular to the direction of the applied strain. Cells remained viable in the microdevice for several days. As opposed to existing microfluidic or macroscale stretching devices, this device can impose changing, anisotropic and time-varying strain fields in order to more closely mimic the complexities of strains occurring in vivo.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10529-013-1381-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Highlights

Mechanical forces play an important role in the development, homeostasis and repair of tissues
Prior to performing each stretching experiment, calibration was performed by relating the pressure in the low pressure chambers and the strain field in the flexible membrane
We investigated the repeatability of the strain field over time and found very little change in the magnitude of the deformation over 20 h under constant low pressure conditions, as depicted in Supplementary Fig. 3

Summary

Introduction

Mechanical forces play an important role in the development, homeostasis and repair of tissues. Tissue-embedded cells undergo mechanical strains that often vary spatially and temporally It is the case in vascular tissues where the combination of the local hemodynamic forces (Frydrychowicz et al 2008) with the anisotropic mechanical properties of vascular tissues (Duprey et al 2010; Tremblay et al 2010) exposed endothelial and smooth muscle cells to complex multi-axial and cyclical deformations. These strain fields can induce significant sub-cellular, cellular- and multi-cellular remodeling responses in a frequency and magnitude dependent manner (Balachandran et al 2011; Goldyn et al 2009; Jungbauer et al 2008)

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