Oxygen-Purged Microfluidic Device to Enhance Cell Viability in Photopolymerized PEG Hydrogel Microparticles.

Encapsulating cells within biocompatible materials is a widely used strategy for cell delivery and tissue engineering. While cells are commonly suspended within bulk hydrogel-forming solutions during gelation, substantial interest in the microfluidic fabrication of miniaturized cell encapsulation vehicles has more recently emerged. Here, we utilize multiphase microfluidics to encapsulate cells within photopolymerized picoliter-volume water-in-oil droplets at high production rates. The photoinitiated polymerization of polyethylene glycol diacrylate (PEGDA) is used to continuously produce solid particles from aqueous liquid drops containing cells and hydrogel forming solution. It is well understood that this photoinitiated addition reaction is inhibited by oxygen. In contrast to bulk polymerization in which ambient oxygen is rapidly and harmlessly consumed, allowing the polymerization reaction to proceed, photopolymerization within air permeable polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic devices allows oxygen to be replenished by diffusion as it is depleted. This sustained presence of oxygen and the consequential accumulation of peroxy radicals produce a dramatic effect upon both droplet polymerization and post-encapsulation cell viability. In this work we employ a nitrogen microjacketed microfluidic device to purge oxygen from flowing fluids during photopolymerization. By increasing the purging nitrogen pressure, oxygen concentration was attenuated, and increased post-encapsulation cell viability was achieved. A reaction-diffusion model was used to predict the cumulative intradroplet concentration of peroxy radicals, which corresponded directly to post-encapsulation cell viability. The nitrogen-jacketed microfluidic device presented here allows the droplet oxygen concentration to be finely tuned during cell encapsulation, leading to high post-encapsulation cell viability.

Changes in cytoplasmic volume are sufficient to drive spindle scaling.

The mitotic spindle must function in cell types that vary greatly in size, and its dimensions scale with the rapid, reductive cell divisions that accompany early stages of development. The mechanism responsible for this scaling is unclear, because uncoupling cell size from a developmental or cellular context has proven experimentally challenging. We combined microfluidic technology with Xenopus egg extracts to characterize spindle assembly within discrete, geometrically defined volumes of cytoplasm. Reductions in cytoplasmic volume, rather than developmental cues or changes in cell shape, were sufficient to recapitulate spindle scaling observed in Xenopus embryos. Thus, mechanisms extrinsic to the spindle, specifically a limiting pool of cytoplasmic component(s), play a major role in determining spindle size.