Evaluation of a mechanical stimulus to cellular nucleus by the microfluidic device

Abstract

In this paper, we propose simple and effective microfluidic device to load a mechanical stimulus on numerous cells with scalability, in order to investigate the correlation between gene expression and morphological changes of a cell. Therefore, we make a microfluidic device which apply a mechanical stimulus (compression force) to cells by using MEMS technique. In particular, our improved device is designed to collect the numerous cells. In experiment, we achieved the compression of both cells and cellular nuclei, observing the deformation of each cells and cellular nuclei precisely, and collecting the numerous cells for performing gene expression assay. Furthermore, we designed S-curved microchannel and successfully find morphological changes of nucleated cell (mouse fibroblast cell) by repeated compression in one view filed by using high speed observation system differ from previous study.