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Migrating Cells Can Make The Difference Between Left And Right

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Migrating Cells Can Make The Difference Between Left And Right

Researchers from UCLA discovered that cells prefer to turn right in their migration process when changes occur in their environment. They where also able to explain the processes that occurs inside cells when they are migrating and creating the left-right asymmetry in tissues. This left-right asymmetry is very important as this is the way in which differences between the right and left side structures like the brain or the hand are created.

The study provides a basis for discovering how to stimulate a patient stem cells to create a liver or a kidney or even a heart . Chances to manage to recreate tissue that is damaged by diseases like arthritis or osteoporosis are also high in the near future.

Researchers were able to create in the lab a culture surface for stem cells, using microtechnology. This culture surface contained stripes of protein substrates that present the capacity to be cell-adhesive or cell-repellent. This two types of stripes were placed alternatively on the culture surface. The scientists compared this culture surface with a floor that has alternating narrow horizontal stripes of carpet and tile. This type of surface can be observed in human tissues when cells are migrating.

In their migration process, when cells reach the interface between cell-adhesive and cell-repellent stripes, they present a tendency to turn right with a angle of 20 degrees and after this right turning, the cells lined up in long parallel rows. After this alignment, the cells produced diagonal stripes over the entire surface.

Cell Culture

Cell Culture

These findings are very impressive because there was no clue that the cellular surface will trigger a right-left asymmetry in the migration of cells. In addition, vascular cells that were used for this study spontaneously formed structures in the culture. The conclusion was that cells can sense substrates on which they are growing  and the surface on which they proliferate can influence both cell migration and future structures that will be formed. An other interesting fact was the response of the cells to the horizontal stripes when they reorganized into diagonal stripes.

Scientists now hope to able to exploit these new findings and use cellular substrates that can interfere with the cell migration and proliferation process by instructing them to produce tissue or structures that are needed for replacement.

The next logical step would be trying to guide cells to organize into the desired two-dimensional structures and even into three-dimensional structures. Future applications of this study may help scientist engineer organs from patient’s stem cells, an important step forward in the organ transplantation field, considering nowadays the shortage of donor organs and the possible complications like graft-versus-host disease.