A research team from Canada has developed an automated microfluidic cell culture platform for monitoring the growth, responses and survival of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) at a single cell level.
The scientists would be able to use the new tool to observe the different culture conditions at the same time, so that they could know and understand the growth factor requirements for survival of HSCs.
According to Véronique Lecault, who is the main author of the study and also a PhD student in the UBC’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering new avenues for exploring complex biological issues could be provided because of the capacity to execute greatly parallel cultures of single non-adherent mammalian cells. The results could be used in wider range of applications such as clone selection, drug development and culture optimization. The findings would be published in the May 22 dated online journal Nature Methods. Lecault further states that HSCs are located mostly in adult bone marrows and have a surprising capacity to maintain the continual production of specialized blood cells.
The HSCs are very important especially in the treatment of blood borne diseases and cancer but the mechanisms which regulate their division into stem cells or mature cells are still unknown. The HSC’s heterogeneous nature further causes difficulties during the study, as they hide their individual reactions into average measurements. These studies would therefore prove to be very important but the techniques used need costly reagents, and are labor intensive and provide limited flexibility to exchange culture conditions or characterize cells.
The research team has created and fabricated microfluidic devices which contain 1600 to 6400 tiny culture chambers, which could sustain cell growth, and an automated time lapse imaging system tracks clones over several days as they grow from the single cells.
Source: http://www.chml.ubc.ca