서강대학교

초록/요약

Cell migration is the important thing in the cell biology. For example, cell migration plays essential roles in angiogenesis, embryonic development, wound healing, inflammation, and cancer metastasis. It is often meditated by chemical concentration gradient. In the past few years, many types of assays have been developed for chemotaxis study. Among them, microfluidic chemotaxis devices (μFCD) have advantages of generating stable chemical concentration gradients and enabling mimicking in vivo environment. Especillay, μFCD based on hydrogel blocks fluidic flow which introduces chemicals into microchannels from a cell chamber, so that only chemical diffusion can occur without any flow disturbance. So far, conventional assays of μFCD can make one-directional chemical gradients in a cell chamber only. However, cells are exposed to various types of chemical attractants and stimulants, so that it is needed to study for cell migration under similar environments. Here, we first develope a prototype microfluidic multiple chemotaxis devices based on agarose and PDMS that capable of generating multiple chemical concentration gradient within a microfluidic channel. Using this device, salmonella typhimurium ΔppGpp/Lux/GFP was successfully obseved move toward an attractant chemical gradient direction. The most expected aspect of our device is its ability to generate various concentration gradients and observe cell migration at complex stimulation.