Berlin 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 10: Postersession II

BP 10.47: Poster

Montag, 12. März 2018, 17:30–19:30, Poster C

Amoeboid cells as a candidate for drug delivery — •Valentino Lepro, Oliver Nagel, Setareh Sharifi, and Carsten Beta — Institut für Physik und Astronomie, Universität Potsdam

The increasing interest towards new frontiers of drug delivery and micro-actuators raises the need to develop systems able to transport micron-sized objects in a directed fashion. A promising strategy that recently emerged is to exploit living cells as smart, steerable, and biochemically powered carriers. Inspired by amoeboid cells such as leukocytes migrating in our bodies, this project explores the potential of chemotactic eukaryotic cells as micro-carriers, using Dictyostelium discoideum as a model organism. Such chemotactically guided transport by amoeboid cells proved to be robust and reliable. However, due to the complex and not fully understood nature of amoeboid motion and cell-substrate interaction, the details of this process are not well understood and it remains difficult to regulate. Here, we present a more quantitative analysis indicating that cells loaded with a microparticle tend to displace more efficiently than unloaded ones, resulting in a particle-size dependent diffusion coefficient of loaded cells. Moreover, isolated cell-particle pairs may behaved like non-linear oscillators suggesting that the cell-particle interaction acts as a stimulus that enhances cell motility. In particular, the different adhesion geometries induced by the additional confinement could favor cytoskeleton polarization, which in turn promotes motility. Furthermore, we used gelatin gels as a simplistic model of a 3D tissue structure, to mimic a more natural environment for cell-based microtransport.