A microfluidic design to provide a stable and uniform in vitro microenvironment for cell culture inspired by the redundancy characteristic of leaf areoles

Abstract

The leaf venation is considered to be an optimal transportation system with the mesophyll cells being divided by minor veins into small regions named areoles. The transpiration of water in different regions of a leaf fluctuates over time making the transportation of water in veins fluctuate as well. However, because of the existence of multiple paths provided by the leaf venation network and the pits on the walls of the vessels, the pressure field and nutrient concentration in the areoles that the mesophyll cells live in are almost uniform. Therefore, inspired by such structures, a microfluidic design of a novel cell culture chamber has been proposed to obtain a stable and uniform microenvironment. The device consists of a novel microchannel system imitating the vessels in the leaf venation to transport the culture medium, a cell culture chamber imitating the areole and microgaps imitating the pits. The effects of the areole and pit on flow fields in the cell culture chamber have been discussed. The results indicate that the bio-inspired microfluidic device is a robust platform to provide an in vivo like fluidic microenvironment.

Human‐on‐Leaf‐Chip: A Biomimetic Vascular System Integrated with Chamber‐Specific Organs

“…Thus considerable attention has been directed toward engineering vascular system on chips inspired by the natural complex vascular networks, through which animals and plants efficiently transport fluids and cells over a long distance. [ 19,20 ] Progress has been made to establish a set of biomimetic design principles to achieve physiologic blood flow within an artificial vascular network. [ 21 ] Murray's law, originally obtained from the study of mammalian cardiovascular systems describing the optimum conditions of the branching hierarchical structures of blood vessels, has been broadly utilized to design artificial vascular microfluidic networks.…”

A microfluidic platform culturing two cell lines paralleled under in-vivo like fluidic microenvironment for testing the tumor targeting of nanoparticles

“…To culture two cell lines paralleled, an axisymmetric structure of the microfluidic chip is designed (as shown in In previous works, the existence of multiple flow paths around the cell culture chamber has been demonstrated to be useful for constructing a uniform and stable flow fields inside the chamber [35,36]. In this work, microgaps around the cell culture chamber has also been designed (as shown in Fig.…”

“…The A549 cells and Hela cells (Cell Bank of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China) are cultured simultaneously in the same microfluidic chip. The device is sterilized and coated with fibronectin according to previous works [35,36]. Before introducing the cells, the microchannels are filled with culture medium containing 89% DMEM, 10% FBS and 1% PS (Gibco, USA) to remove the surplus proteins and gas.…”

Bladder cancer hunting: A microfluidic paper‐based analytical device

“…The microfluidics-based methods have been widely used for the diagnosis of different diseases, while most of the microfluidic devices are still in the laboratory stage [8]. An important reason for this commercial failure is the disadvantages of the traditional materials used in these devices [9,10], such as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), and polypropylene (PP). For instance, although PDMS-based microfluidic chips have the advantages of miniaturization, integration, and automation, these devices cannot be preserved for a long time [11], and the operation process is complex [8].…”