Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting | Singapore

Mechanobiology of Disease

Poster Abstracts

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.

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