Journal
JOURNAL OF BIOMECHANICS
Volume 45, Issue 1, Pages 123-128Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jbiomech.2011.09.007
Keywords
Biomechanics; Cardiac differentiation; Cell manipulation; Human embryonic stem cell; Optical tweezers
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Funding
- Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [CityU 120310]
- UGC [SEG_CityU 01]
- Theme-based Research Scheme [T13-F06]
- CC Wong Foundation
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Human embryonic stem cells (hESC) and hESC-derived cardiomyocytes (hESC-CM) hold great promise for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However the mechanobiological properties of hESC and hESC-CM remains elusive. In this paper, we examined the dynamic and static micromechanical properties of hESC and hESC-CM, by manipulating via optical tweezers at the single-cell level. Theoretical approaches were developed to model the dynamic and static mechanical responses of cells during optical stretching. Our experiments showed that the mechanical stiffness of differentiated hESC-CM increased after cardiac differentiation. Such stiffening could associate with increasingly organized myofibrillar assembly that underlines the functional characteristics of hESC-CM. In summary, our findings lay the ground work for using hESC-CMs as models to study mechanical and contractile defects in heart diseases. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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