RESUMEN
The contractile function of skeletal muscle is essential for maintaining the vital activity of life. Muscular diseases such as muscular dystrophy severely compromise the quality of life of patients and ultimately lead to death. There is therefore an urgent need to develop therapeutic agents for these diseases. In a previous study, we showed that three-dimensional skeletal muscle tissues fabricated using the magnetic force-based tissue engineering technique exhibited contractile activity, and that drug effects could be evaluated based on the contractile activity of the skeletal muscle tissues. However, the reported method requires a large number of cells and the tissue preparation procedure is complex. It is therefore necessary to improve the tissue preparation method. In this study, a miniature device made of polydimethylsiloxane was used to simplify the production of contracting skeletal muscle tissues applicable to high-throughput screening. The effects of model drugs on the contractile force generation of skeletal muscle tissues prepared from mouse C2C12 myoblast and human induced pluripotent stem cells were evaluated using the miniature muscle device. The results indicated that the muscle device system could provide a useful tool for drug screening.
Asunto(s)
Contracción Muscular , Músculo Esquelético/citología , Animales , Diferenciación Celular , Línea Celular , Células Madre Pluripotentes Inducidas/citología , Ratones , Mioblastos/citología , Ingeniería de Tejidos/métodosRESUMEN
A mirror-field confined compact electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma source using permanent magnets was developed, aiming for the realization of high-quality plasma processings where high-density reactive species are supplied to a substrate with minimizing the ion bombardment damages. The ECR position was located between a microwave transmissive window and a quartz limiter, and plasmas were transported from the ECR position to a midplane of the magnetic mirror field through the quartz limiter. Thus, a radius of core plasma could be determined by the limiter, which was 15 mm in this study. Plasma parameters were investigated by the Langmuir probe measurement. High-density plasma larger than 1011 cm-3 could be produced by applying 5.85-GHz microwave power of 10 W or more. For the outside region of the core plasma where a wafer for plasma processings will be set at, the ion current density was decreased dramatically with distance from the core plasma and became smaller by approximately two orders of magnitude that in the core plasma region for the radial position of 40 mm, suggesting the realization of reduction in ion bombardment damages.