Abstract
In tissue engineering, autofluorescence of polymer scaffolds often lowers the image contrast, making it difficult to examine cells and subcellular structures. Treating the scaffold materials with Sudan Black B (SBB) after cell fixation can effectively suppress autofluorescence, but this approach is not conducive to live cell imaging. Post-culture SBB treatment also disrupts intracellular structures and leads to reduced fluorescence intensity of the targets of interest. In this study, we introduce pre-culture SBB treatment to suppress autofluorescence, where SBB is applied to polymeric scaffold materials before cell seeding. The results show that the autofluorescence signals emitted from polycaprolactone (PCL) scaffolds in three commonly used fluorescence channels effectively decrease without diminishing the fluorescence signals emitted from the cells. The pre-culture SBB treatment does not significantly affect cell viability. The autofluorescence suppressive effect does not substantially diminish during the culturing period up to 28 days. The results also show that cell migration, proliferation, and myogenic differentiation in pre-culture SBB-treated groups do not exhibit statistical difference from the non-treated groups. As such, this approach greatly improves the fluorescence image quality for examining live cell behaviors and dynamics while the cells are cultured within autofluorescent polymer scaffolds.
Highlights
Polymeric biomaterials are widely used as cell culturing scaffolds in tissue engineering
We extended the use of Sudan Black B (SBB) based autofluorescence suppression to live cell imaging
The results showed that pre-culture SBB treatment can effectively suppress the autofluorescence of polymeric scaffold materials without significantly changing cell growth and responses
Summary
Polymeric biomaterials are widely used as cell culturing scaffolds in tissue engineering. In-situ observation of live cell responses is difficult In view of these limitations, fluorescence labeling is used as a primary approach to investigate the interactions between cells and polymeric scaffolds. The autofluorescence interference can be addressed by staining the targets of interest with a labeling dye that has the excitation wavelength outside the excitation spectrum of autofluorescent scaffold materials[10] Such approaches, often require the use of near infrared fluorescent dyes. SBB based autofluorescence suppression has yet been used for live cell imaging This limits the wide adoption of SBB treatments in investigating many dynamic cellular and molecular processes, such as Ca2+ flux, cell migration, and real-time cell responses upon electric and/or mechanical stimulations, etc.[26,27,28]
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