This paper proposes a microfluidic device which can perform simultaneous observation on cell growth with and without applying periodic hydrostatic pressure (Yokoyama et al. Sci. Rep. 2017, 7, 427). The device is called on-chip cell incubator. It is known that culture with periodic hydrostatic pressure benefits the elasticity of a cultured cell sheet based on the results in previous studies, but how the cells respond to such a stimulus during the culture is not yet clear. In this work, we focused on cell behavior under periodic hydrostatic pressure from the moment of cell seeding. The key advantage of the proposed device is that we can compare the results with and without periodic hydrostatic pressure while all other conditions were kept the same. According to the results, we found that cell sizes under periodic hydrostatic pressure increase faster than those under atmospheric pressure, and furthermore, a frequency-dependent fluctuation of cell size was found using Fourier analysis.
Keywords: cell growth; on-chip cell incubator; periodic hydrostatic pressure; periodic pressure; simultaneous multiple chamber observation; time-lapse observation.