Department of Biophysics, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
MOE Key Laboratory for Neuroinformation, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, Sichuan, People's Republic of China.
Biofabrication. 2021 Aug 31;13(4). doi: 10.1088/1758-5090/ac1ea8.
Cell culture systems are indispensabletools for biomedical research. Although conventional two-dimensional (2D) cell cultures are still used for most biomedical and biological studies, the three-dimensional (3D) cell culture technology attracts increasing attention from researchers, especially in cancer and stem cell research. Due to the different spatial structures, cells in 2D and 3D cultures exhibit different biochemical and biophysical phenotypes. Therefore, a new platform with both 2D and 3D cell cultures is needed to bridge the gap between 2D and 3D cell-based assays. Here, a simultaneous 2D and 3D cell culture array system was constructed by microprinting technology, in which cancer cells exhibited heterozygous geometry structures with both 2D monolayers and 3D spheroids. Cells grown in 3D spheroids showed higher proliferation ability and stronger cell-cell adhesion. Spheroids derived from various types of cancer cell lines exhibited distinct morphologies through a geometrical confinement stimulated biomechanical transduction. Z-projected images of cancer cell aggregates were used to analyze 3D multicellular architecture features. Notably, by using a support vector machine classifier, we distinguished tumor cells from normal cells with an accuracy greater than 95%, according to the geometrical features of multicellular spheroids in phase contrast microscopy images. Cancer cells in multicellular spheroid arrays exhibited higher drug resistance of anticancer drug cisplatin than cells grown in 2D cultures. Finally, we developed a co-culture system composed of tumor spheroid arrays, fibroblast cells and photo-crosslinkable gelatin methacryloyl hydrogel to mimic tumor microenvironment which consisted of solid tumor massed, surrounding stromal cells and extracellular matrix. Together, our newly developed simultaneous 2D and 3D cell culture array has great potential in comprehensive evaluation of cellular events in both 2D and 3D, rapid production of spheroid arrays and multicellular geometry-based tumor cell detection.
细胞培养系统是生物医学研究不可或缺的工具。尽管传统的二维(2D)细胞培养仍然用于大多数生物医学和生物学研究,但三维(3D)细胞培养技术越来越受到研究人员的关注,尤其是在癌症和干细胞研究中。由于空间结构的不同,2D 和 3D 培养中的细胞表现出不同的生化和生物物理表型。因此,需要一个具有 2D 和 3D 细胞培养的新平台来弥合基于 2D 和 3D 细胞的测定之间的差距。在这里,通过微印刷技术构建了一个同时具有 2D 和 3D 细胞培养的阵列系统,其中癌细胞表现出具有 2D 单层和 3D 球体的杂合几何结构。在 3D 球体中生长的细胞表现出更高的增殖能力和更强的细胞间粘附力。通过几何约束刺激生物力学转导,各种类型的癌细胞系衍生的球体表现出不同的形态。使用癌症细胞聚集体的 Z 投影图像来分析 3D 多细胞结构特征。值得注意的是,通过使用支持向量机分类器,根据相差显微镜图像中多细胞球体的几何特征,我们能够以超过 95%的准确率将肿瘤细胞与正常细胞区分开来。在多细胞球体阵列中的癌细胞对顺铂等抗癌药物的耐药性高于 2D 培养中的细胞。最后,我们开发了一种共培养系统,该系统由肿瘤球体阵列、成纤维细胞和光交联明胶甲基丙烯酰基水凝胶组成,以模拟由实体瘤、周围基质细胞和细胞外基质组成的肿瘤微环境。总之,我们新开发的同时具有 2D 和 3D 细胞培养的阵列在综合评估 2D 和 3D 中的细胞事件、快速生成球体阵列和基于多细胞几何形状的肿瘤细胞检测方面具有很大的潜力。