Bioengineering Custom Cell Microenvironments with Versatile Maskless Photopatterning
November 28, 5pm CET
Dr. Manuel Théry, CEA, & Dr. Harikrishnan Parameswaran, Northeastern University
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
8AM PST | 11AM EST | 4PM GMT | 5PM CET
Dr. Manuel Théry, Research Director, CEA, Hopital Saint-Louis, Physics of cytoskeleton & Morphogenesis lab
Dr. Harikrishnan Parameswaran, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University, College of Engineering
In vivo, the cellular microenvironment has a crucial impact on the regulation of cell behavior and functions such as cellular differentiation, proliferation and migration. However, its biochemical and structural complexity limits our understanding of the key parameters regulating cell behavior. One of the challenges confronting cell biologists is to work with controlled and reproducible microenvironments in vitro to more efficiently study living cells and model diseases.
The speakers present a versatile, contactless and maskless photopatterning system, PRIMO, which allows to engineer custom in vitro microenvironments and fine-tune their mechanical and biochemical properties, at the micrometer scale with high flexibility and reproducibility. Indeed, this UV projection system can be used to structure cell culture substrates through photopolymerization (microfabrication with photoresist, microstructuration of hydrogels) and to functionalize any cell culture substrates (stiff/soft, flat/microstructured) through protein micropatterning.
They will show how this technology opens new possibilities for a large range of applications from sub-cellular to multi-cellular level: cytoskeleton organization, focal adhesions, cell migration, stem cell differentiation, single cell confinement in microwells, tissue engineering, drug testing, disease modelling – with a focus on asthma and the use of extracellular matrix micropatterning to study force transmission in a two-cell ensemble of human airway smooth muscle cells.
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