Abstract
Coral polyps are basic clonal biological units of reef corals. However, in vitro experimental model for long-term physiological and ecological studies has not been well developed due to the difficulty of effectively acquiring and culturing single polyps. This study developed an experimental platform based on microfluidics for culturing single coral polyps and tracing its growth state over time in the long run. The corresponding computational modeling was conducted to predict the metabolic processes under the static and dynamic conditions by coupling the mass transfer and reaction with Navier-Stokes equations. Design and fabrication of the microfluidic chip was the key to provide a constant laminar flow environment that enabled the controlled high oxygen and bicarbonate transfer for the cultivation of the single coral polyps. The single coral polyps were induced to bail out of the coral reef upon the chemical stress and cultured for more than fifteen days in the microfluidic chip. It was found that the single coral polyps in the microfluidic chip can maintain their normal metabolic process over the cultivation period, suggesting that our microfluidic platform can serve as a suitable tool to study the coral polyps by providing a controllable and suitable biological microenvironment.
Highlights
Coral polyps are basic clonal biological units of reef corals
It has been suggested that studying the coral polyps, which serves as model organisms for reef corals, is a more plausible way to acquire the necessary physiological information to understand the biological behaviors of reef corals[11,12,13,14,15]
In order to solve the above problem, a biomimetic microwell-based microfluidic chip platform is presented here for the long-term culture of the single coral polyps, which can conveniently be combined with the microscopy
Summary
Coral polyps are basic clonal biological units of reef corals. in vitro experimental model for long-term physiological and ecological studies has not been well developed due to the difficulty of effectively acquiring and culturing single polyps. It was found that the single coral polyps in the microfluidic chip can maintain their normal metabolic process over the cultivation period, suggesting that our microfluidic platform can serve as a suitable tool to study the coral polyps by providing a controllable and suitable biological microenvironment. Experimental methods for primary cultures have been established, the subsequent efficient proliferation of such cnidarian cells is still a problem This is more or less due to lack of the experimental approaches to screen the key factors which affect the metabolic process of reef corals in a microscopic level. The other one is to induce the detachment of the single polyps from the coral skeletons For both methods, the main problem is how to create a suitable in vitro environment to support the long-term survival of the coral polyps. Experimental results confirmed that this coral-polyp-on-chip methodology is a more efficient approach to support the in vitro long-term culture of single coral polyps
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