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Mechanobiology of Disease
Poster Abstracts
83
35-POS
Board 35
Establishment of the Quantification Platform for Cardiomyocyte Differentiation
Eun Min Ko
, Unghyun Ko, Young Bin Cho, M. J. Son, D. M. Kim.Jennifer H. Shin.
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea.
Cardiovascular disease is one of the most popular causes of deaths in 2000s. However, current
medical procedures cannot completely restore the dysfunctional cardiac tissues. Only the heart
transplantation can recover the damaged tissues, but unfortunately there are few donors for the
needs. For this reason, it is essential to figure out the roles of differentiation factors for in vitro
cardiac tissue. In physiological condition, cardiac tissue influenced by microenvironment like
alignment of cells, electrical and biochemical stimulus, and it is known as these
microenvironment also effects on cardiomyocyte differentiation. Also the force generated by
cardiomyocyte usually used as an indicator of degree of differentiation. In this study, we
developed a cardiomyogenic platform that provides these microenvironments to understand the
differentiation factors and the mechanisms. We developed platform that implements biochemical
factors, uniaxial patterns generated by micro-contact printing (μCP) and measures traction stress
of cardiomyocyte by traction force microscopy (TFM). Using our platform, we successfully
figured out change of the cellular elongation with width of pattern and direction of traction stress
vector ordered as width of pattern narrowed. With the traction stress vector, different position of
cells within the pattern made cells influenced by force differently, this made change in degree of
differentiation. We also checked distribution of traction force for a pattern change with sequence
of differentiation. From the results, we expect to distinguish a degree of differentiation by
magnitude and distribution of traction stress and further more combine with electrical stimulus
and find the optimal conditions for better differentiation of cadiomyocyte to be used in tissue
engineering applications. This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF) grant (No. 2015R1A2A2A04004469 and No. 2013R1A2A2A01017014) from the
Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, Republic of Korea.