In vivo, cell movement plays a vital role in many important biological processes, including: wound healing, immune response, and potential spread of cancer.
Most people don't die from primary tumors," said Kolade Adebowale, a member of Stanford University's graduate program in chemistry, engineering and human health medicine. "But the problem is that when the cancer cells in the tumor gain the ability to metastasize or migrate to different parts of the body, it is dangerous. ”
To advance the study of cell migration, Adebowale and colleagues in the lab of Ovijit Chaudhuri, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. Based on the study, published April 19 in the journal Nature Materials, the new findings upend the idea of cell migration and better understand the effects of the material's elasticity and viscosity on cells.
"We found that if the cancer cells were on a very hard plastic, or if they were on a soft, viscoelastic material, the migration outcomes would be very different," said Adebowale, lead author of the **. It is demonstrated that the behavior of cancer is not only related to cancer cells, but also to the environment in which cancer cells interact. ”
Traditionally, cell migration has been studied on a hard, transparent polymer called a "tissue culture chip" or elastic hydrogel such as soft** glasses. Based on these current studies, the current view is that cells cannot migrate on hydrogels that are too soft. However, the researchers' goal is to mimic real biological tissues that mimic cell migration – they are soft, not purely elastic like rubber bands, but viscoelastic.
"Cell migration chips need to be solid materials, but also have viscous and liquid properties that can flow over a longer period of time," Adebowale says. "The modified performance is closer to the biological environment.
Chaudhuri said the examples of viscoelastic materials created for the study of cell migration chips are more like mozzarella. These materials initially resist deformation, just like elastic materials, but over time, this resistance undergoes viscous relaxation.
Viscoelasticity and cell culture
The fact that the cell migration patterns observed by the researchers are not visible on hard substrates or only elastic substrates suggests that viscoelasticity is critical to the behavior of cells, so viscoelastic cell culture is even more important in future studies.
"This challenges the traditional view of how we understand cell migration," Chaudhuri said. ”。Cell migration on viscoelastic tissues is different from migration on glass, plastic Petri dishes, or elastomeric gels. Therefore, if we want to study cell migration, we need to use viscoelastic matrices. ”
While this study looked at single-cell migration, cancer cells migrate as a population in the body, with different stages of development involving the collective movement of cells.
Biofount Cell Migration Array, catalog number: QX-XP-2K