Berlin 2018 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 10: Postersession II

BP 10.55: Poster

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

Organ-on-a-chip meets traction force microscopy: In situ characterization of forces in 3D µ-tissues — •Stefanie Fuchs, Oliver Schneider, Christopher Probst, and Peter Loskill — Department of Cell and Tissue Engineering, Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB, Stuttgart, Germany

Organ-on-a-Chip (OoC) systems are microfluidic devices which enable the cultivation of 3D tissues in a precisely controllable, physiological microenvironment. In combination with human induced pluripotent stem cells these systems have the potential to revolutionize the drug development process. Therefore, it is essential to accurately characterize the integrated tissues. An important characteristic of many tissues is the force exerted by the cells. This information is useful to characterize for instance the growth of cells and the contraction state of (cardiac) muscle cells. Traction force microscopy (TFM) is a commonly used tool to spatially resolve these forces.

Here, we present a TFM system directly embeddable into OoC systems, which consists of an elastic layer with integrated fluorescent nanobeads on the surface. Based on the elastic modulus of the substrate, the force on the surface can be derived from the bead displacement. We highlight that our system directly integrates a gauging mechanism for the determination of the substrate’s mechanical properties, allowing the accurate determination of forces by considering each individual sample composition. The presented system enables precise in situ measurements of forces exerted by different tissue types in an OoC with a simple fluorescence microscope.