The pericellular matrix stiffness is strongly associated with its biochemical and structural changes during the aging and osteoarthritis progress of articular cartilage. However, how substrate stiffness modulates the chondrocyte regulatory volume decrease (RVD) and calcium signaling in chondrocytes remains unknown. This study aims to investigate the effects of substrate stiffness on the chondrocyte RVD and calcium signaling by recapitulating the physiologically relevant substrate stiffness. Our results showed that substrate stiffness induces completely different dynamical deformations between the cell swelling and recovering progresses. Chondrocytes swell faster on the soft substrate but recovers slower than the stiff substrate during the RVD response induced by the hypo-osmotic challenge. We found that stiff substrate enhances the cytosolic Ca oscillation of chondrocytes in the iso-osmotic medium. Furthermore, chondrocytes exhibit a distinctive cytosolic Ca oscillation during the RVD response. Soft substrate significantly improves the Ca oscillation in the cell swelling process whereas stiff substrate enhances the cytosolic Ca oscillation in the cell recovering process. Our work also suggests that the TRPV4 channel is involved in the chondrocyte sensing substrate stiffness by mediating Ca signaling in a stiffness-dependent manner. This helps to understand a previously unidentified relationship between substrate stiffness and RVD response under the hypo-osmotic challenge. A better understanding of substrate stiffness regulating chondrocyte volume and calcium signaling will aid the development of novel cell-instructive biomaterial to restore cellular functions.
Keywords: TRPV4; calcium signaling; regulatory volume decrease; substrate stiffness; viscoelasticity.