Irimia Daniel, Charras Guillaume, Agrawal Nitin, Mitchison Timothy, Toner Mehmet
BioMEMS Resource Center, Center for Engineering in Medicine and Surgical Services, Massachusetts General Hospital, Shriners Hospital for Children, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Lab Chip. 2007 Dec;7(12):1783-90. doi: 10.1039/b710524j. Epub 2007 Sep 4.
Asymmetrical delivery of stimuli to moving cells for perturbing spatially-heterogeneous intracellular signaling is an experimental challenge not adequately met by existing technologies. Here, we report a robust microfluidic platform allowing localized treatment of the front and/or back of moving cells which crawl through narrow channels that they completely occlude. The enabling technical element for this study is a novel design for precise, passive balancing of flow inside the microfluidic device by contacting two fluid streams before splitting them again. The microchannels constrain cell morphology and induce qualitative and quantitative changes in neutrophil chemotaxis that mimic cells crawling through tissues.
向移动细胞不对称地传递刺激以扰乱空间异质的细胞内信号传导是现有技术尚未充分应对的一项实验挑战。在此,我们报告了一种强大的微流控平台,该平台可对在完全堵塞的狭窄通道中爬行的移动细胞的前端和/或后端进行局部处理。本研究的关键技术要素是一种新颖的设计,通过在再次分流之前使两股流体流接触,从而精确、被动地平衡微流控装置内的流动。微通道限制细胞形态,并在中性粒细胞趋化作用中诱导定性和定量变化,模拟细胞在组织中爬行。