Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

3D Cellular Morphotyping of Cell Niches

Published

Author(s)

Stephen J. Florczyk, Mylene H. Simon, Derek Juba, Patrick S. Pine, Sumona Sarkar, Desu Chen, Paula J. Baker, Subhadip Bodhak, Antonio Cardone, Mary C. Brady, Peter Bajcsy, Carl G. Simon Jr.

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) cellular morphotyping is introduced for assessing and comparing the niches provided by biomaterial scaffolds. Many scaffold systems have been advanced to provide synthetic cell niches for tissue engineering and drug screening applications, however there is no method to assess and compare scaffold niches. To overcome this barrier, a strategy for using 3D cell shape measurements to assign a 3D cell morphotype to scaffold niches was developed. Primary human bone marrow stromal cells (hBSMCs) cultured in planar substrate niches yielded cells with flattened morphologies while cells cultured in 3D scaffold niches took on morphologies with greater 3D-character. Multivariate analysis revealed that 3D-character was best described by measuring the cell depth along its shortest axis after aligning cells with a “best-fit” ellipsoid (gyration tensor). These results identify a defining characteristic for classifying scaffold niches and a measurement strategy to enable rational design of scaffold niches based on cell structure-function relationships.
Citation
Nature Methods
Volume
3

Keywords

stem cells, biomaterials, scaffolds, tissue engineering, morphotyping

Citation

Florczyk, S. , Simon, M. , Juba, D. , Pine, P. , Sarkar, S. , Chen, D. , Baker, P. , Bodhak, S. , Cardone, A. , Brady, M. , Bajcsy, P. and Simon, C. (2017), 3D Cellular Morphotyping of Cell Niches, Nature Methods, [online], https://doi.org/10.1021/acsbiomateria (Accessed December 14, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created August 31, 2017, Updated November 10, 2018