Cell Organelle Positioning of Micropatterned Single C2C12 Mouse Myoblasts

Abstract

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.