Stress-strain relationship in pulmonary cells under bidirectional stretch application

Excerpt

Analysing the effects of mechanostimulation on pulmonary cells improves the understanding of the stress-strain relationship in the lungs. While there are plenty of different methods to apply strain on cells and thereby to analyze intracellular and extracellular processes, it remains difficult to measure the resulting strain, in other words the forces produced by cells to counteract the applied strain. Recently we presented a bioreactor to cyclically deflect cells by co-deflecting them with a carrier membrane [1]. The air-tight highly pliant siloxane-carrier membranes [2] used in our bioreactor were modified with Sulfo-SANPAH and RGD peptide [3] to allow cell adherence. Here we present actual data demonstrating changes in mechanical properties of pulmonary cell monolayers as a response to strain levels of up to 20% surface increase. …