Cell deformation using microfluidic chips

Deform and change cell shape using microfluidic chips

Cell growth, gene expression and differentiation are often related to a mechanical environment such as confinement or applied stresses. The use of microfluidic chip enables to control shape and stress of cells even at a single cell level. You will find here a short description of the use of microfluidics for cell shape confinement.

Which microfluidic method can be used to control cell shape and stress?

Using microfluidics, researchers can generate large number of cell shape changes and mechanical stress: cells can be dynamically squeezed with a controlled pressure, cells can be forced to grow in a channel of a given geometry or cells can be submitted to a controlled shear stress.

There are three main methods to control the mechanical behavior of cell:

The easiest method is to force cell to grow in a microfluidic channel or chamber of a given shape. For example, non adherent cells such as yeast or bacterias can be forced to enter in microchannels using “high” pressure. Adherent cell such as Hela mammalian cancer cell can be settle in a microfluidic room and forced to grow with a given shape.

The second method enables dynamic cell deformation using deformable “PDMS Quake valve”. In this case, cells can be dynamically squeezed in a controlled manner using fine pressure change.

Which setup and which microfluidic chip to control cell shape and stresses?

Applications of cell shape change and mechanical stress

Mechanical cell deformation using a microfluidic device has been used in many situations:

It has been used for studies of cytoskeleton behavior [2], reaction¬diffusion mechanisms [3], to mimic mechanically induced behavior of mechanotransduction [4, 5] or cell motility in confined environment [6], mimic tissue organization like the vasculature system [7] and to study the mechanical properties of cancer cells [8].

If the precise geometry of the cell is not of concern, cells can be macroscopically subjected to stress. Stress can be compressive, as an exemple, to study bone cell responses to mechanical stresses [9]; or stress can be stretching, as an example, stretching a flexible membrane on which cells are attached [10].

By forcing a cell to enter a small space, one imposes its geometry. For example, Takeuchi et al. used agarose and PDMS microchambers to force E. coli cells to grow in a circular or sinusoidal shape [11], and Terenna et al. used curve PDMS microchannels to constrain growing yeast cells, which are normally straight, to grow bent in order to study the reorganization of its cytoskeleton [2]. Minc et al. achieved similar results by pushing long yeast cells into PDMS microwells, which made the cells buckle and bend [12]. This method has been used to study yeast polarization and to determine elastic modulus of the cell wall and cell turgor pressure [13]. Beyond shape changes, artificial confinement can induce cell behavior which illuminates underlying mechanisms.

For example, Faure-Andre et al. injected dendritic cells into microchannels and found that the cells recovered their integrin-independent motile behavior found in living tissues [6]. Chau et al. used a PDMS/matrigel device to study cancer metastasis by following migration and deformation of cancer cells in microchannels [14].

For more information about cell deformation you can read the section mechanical deformation and force measurement of our review about microfluidics for cell biology.

If you need to control cell shape and cell mechanical stresses in a microfluidic chip our team will be glad to work with you. Elveflow provides microfluidic flow control instruments and chips to research laboratories. The aim of the Elveflow scientific team is to help all scientific laboratories to use microfluidics in a plug and play manner.

References