Development of a culture chamber for mechanical loading of adherent cells with large uniform strain

Abstract

Based on the current study of the influence of mechanical factors on cell behavior which relies heavily on experiments in vivo, a culture chamber with a large uniform strain area containing a linear motor-powered, up-to-20-Hz cell stretch loading device was developed to exert mechanical effects on cells. In this paper, using the strain uniformity as the target and the substrate thickness as the variable, the substrate bottom of the conventional incubation chamber is optimized by using finite element technique, and finally a new three-dimensional model of the incubation chamber with "M" type structure in the section is constructed, and the distribution of strain and displacement fields are detected by 3D-DIC to verify the numerical simulation results. The experimental results showed that the new cell culture chamber increased the accuracy and homogeneous area of strain loading by 49.13% to 52.45% compared with that before optimization. In addition, the morphological changes of tongue squamous carcinoma cells under the same strain and different loading times were initially studied using this novel culture chamber. In conclusion, the novel cell culture chamber constructed in this paper combines the advantages of previous techniques to deliver uniform and accurate strains for a wide range of cell mechanobiology studies.