ArticleHardwareX2024
An open-source, battery-powered, low-cost, and dual-channel pneumatic pulse generator for microfluidic cell-stretch assays.
Article in HardwareX, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cells in the body are regularly subjected to mechanical forces that influence their biological fate in terms of morphology, gene expression, and differentiation. The current gold standard method to replicate these effects in vitro is to culture cells on devices with elastic substrates and to impart mechanical stretch using mechanical or pneumatic pull-push methods. Microfluidic device designs offer several advantages in this context for general uniform and controlled stretching. However, the experimental setups are bulky, not user-friendly, and often involve several components that reside outside of the tissue culture incubator. Given the wide utility of mechanical stimulation in in-vitro research, our aim was to create a turn-key research tool that bioengineers can deploy in their cell-stretch assays, without having to deal with the complexity and nuances of ad hoc experimental setups. Here, we present an open-source, battery-powered, dual-channel cyclic pneumatic pulse generator box that can reside within an incubator and is compatible with custom microfluidic cell stretch devices. Our method depends on generating pressure-vacuum pulses simply using a linear miniature pneumatic air cylinder actuated using a continuous servo motor. To the best our knowledge, this is a first example of a completely battery-powered, standalone system that doesn't have any peripherals residing out of the incubator. We provide a detailed list of different components as well as the step-by-step assembly process. We validate its performance in a cell stretch assay using a commercially available microfluidic chip. Our results show an acute stimulation of cyclic stretching over 8 h on human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) resulted in preferential alignment of cells perpendicular to the axis of stretch.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.