Invariant left-right (LR) patterning or chirality is critical for embryonic development. The loss or reversal of LR asymmetry is often associated with malformations and disease. Although several theories have been proposed, the exact mechanism of the initiation of the LR symmetry has not yet been fully elucidated. Recently, chirality has been detected within single cells as well as multicellular structures using several in vitro approaches. These studies demonstrated the universality of cell chirality, its dependence on cell phenotype, and the role of physical boundaries. In this review, we discuss the theories for developmental LR asymmetry, compare various in vitro cell chirality model systems, and highlight possible roles of cell chirality in stem cell differentiation. We emphasize that the in vitro cell chirality systems have great promise for helping unveil the nature of chiral morphogenesis in development.
Chirality, or a position bias, is found in many living organisms and has previously been shown to be of critical importance to normal development. Cellular and multicellular observations have begun to show that chirality is indeed found due to unknown mechanisms. To further study this behavior, single C2C12 cells were seeded on rain droplet shaped micropatterns. We hypothesized that this revealed intrinsic characteristics that can be readily determined by image analysis. The droplet shaped patterns allow for easy defining of the polar axis and bias testing. This is an on-going experiment, but preliminary results showed that single cell C2C12 mouse myoblasts have a general preference, with cell nuclei biased in either defined direction (i.e. left or right) and not particularly to one. We propose that single cell micropatterning might be an in vitro tool to study chirality in cells and the mechanisms by which this bias originates.
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