Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2023
DOI
10.1116/6.0003028
Publication Title
Biointerphases
Volume
18
Issue
6
Pages
061002 (1-8)
Abstract
Cell adhesion is of fundamental importance in cell and tissue organization and for designing cell-laden constructs for tissue engineering. Prior methods to assess cell adhesion strength for strongly adherent cells using hydrodynamic shear flow either involved the use of specialized flow devices to generate high shear stress or used simpler implementations like larger height parallel plate chambers that enable multihour cell culture but generate low wall shear stress and are, hence, more applicable for weakly adherent cells. Here, we propose a shear flow assay for adhesion strength assessment of strongly adherent cells that employs off-the-shelf parallel plate chambers for shear flow as well as simultaneous trypsin treatment to tune down the adhesion strength of cells. We implement the assay with a strongly adherent cell type and show that wall shear stress in the 0.07-7 Pa range is sufficient to dislodge the cells with simultaneous trypsin treatment. Imaging of cells over a square centimeter area allows cell morphological analysis of hundreds of cells. We show that the cell area of cells that are dislodged, on average, does not monotonically increase with wall shear stress at the higher end of wall shear stresses used and suggest that this can be explained by the likely higher resistance of high circularity cells to trypsin digestion. The adhesion strength assay proposed can be used to assess the adhesion strength of both weakly and strongly adherent cell types and has the potential to be adapted for substrate stiffness-dependent adhesion strength assessment in mechanobiology studies.
Rights
© 2023 AIP Publishing.
This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in
Patel, A., Bhavanam, B., Keenan, T., & Maruthamuthu, V. (2023). Integrating shear flow and trypsin treatment to assess cell adhesion strength. Biointerphases, 18(6), 1-8, Article 061002.
and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1116/6.0003028.
Version of record included with a 12 month embargo in accordance with publisher policy.
Original Publication Citation
Patel, A., Bhavanam, B., Keenan, T., & Maruthamuthu, V. (2023). Integrating shear flow and trypsin treatment to assess cell adhesion strength. Biointerphases, 18(6), 1-8, Article 061002. https://doi.org/10.1116/6.0003028
ORCID
0009-0001-4841-673X (Patel), 0009-0003-2716-5016 (Bhavanam), 0009-0008-4381-5572 (Keenan), 0000-0002-3470-5274 (Maruthamuthu)
Repository Citation
Patel, Antra; Bhavanam, Bhavana; Keenan, Trevor; and Maruthamuthu, Venkat, "Integrating Shear Flow and Trypsin Treatment to Assess Cell Adhesion Strength" (2023). Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications. 143.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/mae_fac_pubs/143