[Development of a culture chamber for mechanical loading of adherent cells with large uniform strain].

Based on the current study of the influence of mechanical factors on cell behavior which relies heavily on experiments in vivo, a culture chamber with a large uniform strain area containing a linear motor-powered, up-to-20-Hz cell stretch loading device was developed to exert mechanical effects on cells. In this paper, using the strain uniformity as the target and the substrate thickness as the variable, the substrate bottom of the conventional incubation chamber is optimized by using finite element technique, and finally a new three-dimensional model of the incubation chamber with "M" type structure in the section is constructed, and the distribution of strain and displacement fields are detected by 3D-DIC to verify the numerical simulation results. The experimental results showed that the new cell culture chamber increased the accuracy and homogeneous area of strain loading by 49.13% to 52.45% compared with that before optimization. In addition, the morphological changes of tongue squamous carcinoma cells under the same strain and different loading times were initially studied using this novel culture chamber. In conclusion, the novel cell culture chamber constructed in this paper combines the advantages of previous techniques to deliver uniform and accurate strains for a wide range of cell mechanobiology studies.目前研究力学因素对细胞行为的影响很大程度上依赖于离体实验，基于此本文研制了一种具有较大均匀应变区域的培养室，其中含有以直线电机为动力，频率高达20 Hz的细胞拉伸加载装置，可对细胞施加力学作用。本文以应变均匀为目标，基底厚度为变量，利用有限元技术对传统培养室的基板底部进行优化，最后构建了切面为“M”型结构的新型培养室三维模型，并采用三维数字图像相关法（3D-DIC）检测应变场和位移场的分布，以验证数值模拟结果。实验结果表明，新型细胞培养室增大了应变加载的准确性和均匀区域，较优化前提高了49.13%～52.45%。另外，利用该新型培养室初步研究了在同一应变、不同加载时间下舌鳞癌细胞的形态变化。综上，本文构建的新型细胞培养室结合了以往技术的优点，可传递均匀精准的应变，以便用于广泛的细胞机械生物学研究。.