Abstract
During pregnancy, freely floating placental villi are adapted to fluid shear stress due to placental perfusion with maternal plasma and blood. In vitro culture of placental villous explants is widely performed under static conditions, hoping the conditions may represent the in utero environment. However, static placental villous explant culture dramatically differs from the in vivo situation. Thus, we established a flow culture system for placental villous explants and compared commonly used static cultured tissue to flow cultured tissue using transmission and scanning electron microscopy, immunohistochemistry, and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) measurements. The data revealed a better structural and biochemical integrity of flow cultured tissue compared to static cultured tissue. Thus, this new flow system can be used to simulate the blood flow from the mother to the placenta and back in the most native-like in vitro system so far and thus can enable novel study designs.
Highlights
Sci. 2021, 22, 7464. https://doi.org/As a fetal organ, the placenta is temporarily present during pregnancy and serves as the lungs, liver, kidney, and gut of the fetus [1]
The closed flow system consists of five chambers connected in series with four placental explants per chamber (Figure 1)
A six-well plate is used as a static control. (B) The four explants in a static well are shown. (C) Placental villous explants with a cross-sectional diameter of about 0.5 cm are used for the flow and the static explant culture. (D) To prevent sweeping away of the explants in the flow-cycle, a metal plate with needles is used to fix the placental explants. (E) the metal plate with fixed placental villous explants is introduced into the flow chambers. (F,G) The flow chambers are used upside-down (G) to facilitate the direct exposure of explants to the stream of the medium
Summary
Sci. 2021, 22, 7464. https://doi.org/As a fetal organ, the placenta is temporarily present during pregnancy and serves as the lungs, liver, kidney, and gut of the fetus [1]. A variety of static culturing conditions have been developed according to the study design including cultures on the bottom of a well, on a supportive mesh, in a shaking water bath, or freely floating hanging from a styrene block into the medium [4,11,12,13]. All these placental explant culture approaches are static methods with no flow around the villi and all of these approaches differ dramatically from the in vivo situation
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