1. A High-throughput Cell Microarray Platform for Correlative Analysis of Cell Differentiation and Traction Forces
- Author
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Andreas P. Kourouklis, Kerim B. Kaylan, and Gregory H. Underhill
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,Polyacrylamide Hydrogel ,Cellular differentiation ,General Chemical Engineering ,Acrylic Resins ,Cell Culture Techniques ,Fluorescent Antibody Technique ,Bioengineering ,Tissue Array Analysis ,Biology ,Traction force microscopy ,biomechanics ,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology ,Extracellular matrix ,03 medical and health sciences ,Tissue engineering ,Elastic Modulus ,stem and progenitor cell biology ,Animals ,General Immunology and Microbiology ,General Neuroscience ,cell microarrays ,technology, industry, and agriculture ,Cell Differentiation ,microenvironment ,Extracellular Matrix ,Cell biology ,Issue 121 ,030104 developmental biology ,Liver ,Cell culture ,tissue engineering ,Biophysics ,DNA microarray ,biomaterials - Abstract
Microfabricated cellular microarrays, which consist of contact-printed combinations of biomolecules on an elastic hydrogel surface, provide a tightly controlled, high-throughput engineered system for measuring the impact of arrayed biochemical signals on cell differentiation. Recent efforts using cell microarrays have demonstrated their utility for combinatorial studies in which many microenvironmental factors are presented in parallel. However, these efforts have focused primarily on investigating the effects of biochemical cues on cell responses. Here, we present a cell microarray platform with tunable material properties for evaluating both cell differentiation by immunofluorescence and biomechanical cell–substrate interactions by traction force microscopy. To do so, we have developed two different formats utilizing polyacrylamide hydrogels of varying Young's modulus fabricated on either microscope slides or glass-bottom Petri dishes. We provide best practices and troubleshooting for the fabrication of microarrays on these hydrogel substrates, the subsequent cell culture on microarrays, and the acquisition of data. This platform is well-suited for use in investigations of biological processes for which both biochemical (e.g., extracellular matrix composition) and biophysical (e.g., substrate stiffness) cues may play significant, intersecting roles.
- Published
- 2017
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