Poster Presentations
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Microfluidic Podocyte nano-membrane chip for hypertension study
Fan Gang Tseng, Professor, National Tsing Hua University
This paper reports the design, fabrication, and testing of a fully-integrated Microfluidic Podocyte nano-membrane chip for studying pressure effect. Podocyte is the mature glomerular epithelial cell that processes highly branched architecture essential for glomerular filtration in the kidney [1]. Several culture methods were sought to create the podoyte cultures to resemble the microenvironment [2] in vitro for studying their physiological behaviors. However, it is still very difficult to either fully simulate the micro environment or induce their fully differentiation in-vitro [3]. In this study, a micro fluidic environment was designed to accommodate podocyte on a nano porous-membrane (20 nm anodic aluminum oxide,AAO) to assist their accommodation and stimulate the differentiation simultaneously. Eight different pressures were exerted on the differentiated podocyte membrane for observing the morphology changes by fluorescence microscopye. It is found that, when supplied pressures increased from 10 to 50 mmHg, not only more foot processes extended but also their gap distance became closer. For higher pressure, the foot processes length ratio would decrease rapidly to -14.24% or -85.66% for applied pressure higher than 50 mmHg at 60 and 100 mmHg, respectively
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