Department of Biology and Chemistry, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.
Lab Chip. 2013 Mar 21;13(6):1060-9. doi: 10.1039/c3lc40880a.
A microfluidic microdevice was developed to exert mechanical stimulation on an individual suspension cell for mechanosensation research. In this microfluidic chip, an individual cell was isolated from a population of cells, and trapped in a microchannel with a compressive component made of a deflectable membrane. The mechanosensation of HL60 cells (leukemic cells) was studied using this chip, and the results showed that mechanical stimulations could trigger extracellular calcium to flow into HL60 cells through ion channels on cell membranes. The tension on individual HL60 cells exerted by the microdevice was showed large variations in the threshold of mechanosensation activation. In contrast to previous reports using patch clamp technique, there was little influence of cytoskeleton interruption on HL60 cell mechanosensation triggered by whole-cell compression. Additionally, two functional units were integrated in one chip for carrying out mechanosensation study in parallel, where HL60 cells (leukemic cells) and Jurkat cells (lymphocytes) were shown to respond to mechanical stimulation with different kinetics. The results demonstrated that the microfluidic device provides a novel approach to investigating the mechanosensation of single suspension cells in high-throughput.
研制了一种微流控微器件，对单个悬浮细胞施加机械刺激，用于机械感觉研究。在这个微流控芯片中，将单个细胞从细胞群体中分离出来，并困在一个微通道中，该微通道具有由可变形膜制成的压缩部件。使用该芯片研究了 HL60 细胞（白血病细胞）的机械感觉，结果表明机械刺激可以通过细胞膜上的离子通道将细胞外钙离子流入 HL60 细胞。微器件对单个 HL60 细胞施加的张力在机械感觉激活的阈值上表现出很大的变化。与先前使用膜片钳技术的报告相反，细胞骨架中断对全细胞压缩触发的 HL60 细胞机械感觉的影响很小。此外，在一个芯片中集成了两个功能单元，用于并行进行机械感觉研究，其中 HL60 细胞（白血病细胞）和 Jurkat 细胞（淋巴细胞）对机械刺激的反应表现出不同的动力学。结果表明，微流控装置为高通量研究单个悬浮细胞的机械感觉提供了一种新方法。
