力学的相互作用による幹細胞の分化機構解明に向けた三次元力学場計測

抄録

Once nerve cells which construct such as brain get damaged, it is difficult to regenerate. Therefore recently regenerative medicine applying stem cells is taken gathering attention. It's known that mechanical interactions between cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) are greatly concerned with cell differentiation. It has been studied mostly about cell-ECM mechanical interaction in two dimensions (2D), but enough knowledge was not obtained in three dimensions (3D). It has been reported to be able to control the cell differentiation by changing the elastic modulus of scaffold. But many of its mechanisms remain unknown. As a key to elucidate them, 3D mechanical interaction has been required. Thus we focused on digital volume correlation (DVC), which is a method of measuring 3D displacement and strain fields within an object by using a pair of 3D volume images. In this paper, we succeeded to differentiate human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC) to nerve cell in 3D. Besides, we visualized mechanical fields around hMSC cultured in collagen gel by using DVC method based on confocal laser scanning microscopy. As a result, we found that hMSC in collagen gel interacts dynamically with their surrounding 3D microenvironment and the more advance differentiation, the bigger displacement of ECM. From these results, it was indicated that there is the relationship between hMSC differentiation and mechanical interactions.