In this work, we introduce a hybrid atomic-force/near-field scanning microwave microscope, exploiting the tomographic capabilities of the microwave microscopy to explore structures of relevant interest, namely, samples involving both biological and non-biological materials at the same time. In particular, we show imaging of C2C12 muscle cells grown in the presence of bundles of multi-walled carbon nanotubes: here, the microwave microscopy, by virtue of its tomographic potentiality, highlights how cells incorporate some nanotubes in their fibers
The extracellular guanosine 5′-triphosphate, GTP, has been demonstrated to be an enhancer of myogenic cell differentiation in a murine cell line, not yet in human muscle cells. Our hypothesis was that GTP could influence also human skeletal muscle regeneration, specifically in the first phases. We tested GTP stimulus on human muscle precursor cells established in culture by human satellite cells derived from Vastus Lateralis of three young male. Our data show that extracellular GTP (a) up-regulated miRNA (specifically miR133a and miR133b) and myogenic regulator factor and (b) induces human myogenic precursor cells to release exosomes stuffed with guanosine based molecules (mainly guanosine) in the extracellular milieu. We think that probably these exosomes could be addressed to influence by means of their content (mainly guanosine) in paracrine or autocrine manner the surrounding cells and/or at distance other muscles or tissues.
Microwave microscopy has recently attracted intensive effort, owing to its capability to provide quantitative information about the local composition and the electromagnetic response of a sample. Nonetheless, the interpretation of microwave images remains a challenge as the electromagnetic waves interact with the sample and the surrounding in a multitude of ways following different paths: microwave images are a convolution of all contributions. In this work we show that examining the time evolution of the electromagnetic waves allows us to disentangle each contribution, providing images with striking quality and unexplored scenarios for near-field microscopy.
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