I am looking for a cost-effective way to make or purchase a shear stress device to provide fluid shear stress to cells in monolayer culture (0-10 dynes). I received a quote from Flexcell for the Streamer Shear Stress device, but the media volumes used are large (500mL). Any details on your own design or on a purchased model would be great. Ideally I would like to run at least 3 Culture Slips (25 mm x 75 mm x 1 mm) at once.
I've used Cytodyne flow chambers previously--disclaimer: I was a member of the Frangos lab!--and certainly didn't require 500mL media, it just depends on the type of experiment and the duration. However, I used slides not coverslips, but it may be possible to accommodate coverslips.
http://www.cytodyneflowchamber.com
In another lab I've used Warner chambers (RC30) for imaging cells on coverslips. These also did not require 500mL of media.
https://www.warneronline.com/product_cat_info.cfm?id=1251
Machining your own should be doable if you have a good machine shop. The concept isn't hard, but leaks and such are really annoying!
We are use (home-made) flow-chamber for analysis of RBC deformability, adhesion to EC and aggregability.
For example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17900281 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9530828
We use a home made version kindly copied from Stephanie Lehoux, I have made a number of modifications and designed racking etc so we can run 15 chambers in parallel. We can do anything from oscillatory shear stress using a modified animal respirator, to 75 dynes laminar shear and are working on making a physiological pulsatile version at the moment. As our system uses a peristaltic pump, it is no good for looking at interaction with other cell types e.g.monocytes. We have a circulating volume of 30ml. There is a diagram in the supp info in this paper, but have improved upon the system since and we now flow for up to 5 days.I would have to ask before I give out full details. Cheers Steve http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcp.22629/abstract
Hi Chad,
Have you thought of alternative means to instigate fluid shear stress? The paper cited at the bottoms describes a series of equations by which defined degrees of shear stress can by generated directly in standard tissue culture plates.
The monolayer is submerged in a known volume of fluid of known viscocity and rocked at a known angle using a standard cell laboratory cell rocker.
This method has the advantages that its extreemly cheap and high throughput, which makes it ideal for screening the effects of FSS before the use of parallel plate flow chambers.
Citation
X. Zhou, D. Liu, L. You, and L. Wang, “Quantifying fluid shear stress in a rocking culture dish.,” J. Biomech., vol. 43, no. 8, pp. 1598–602, May 2010.
By the way, if you have an android device, this app is based on the model defined in the above paper
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fss.generator&hl=en
BW
Tom
If anyone ever stumbles again across this question:
Yes, I have developed and built a complete system. The details are published in the following article: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbioe.2019.00091/full
Peter Sobolewski I have a question. Do you have any idea on what happened to Cytodyne fluid flow chamber company? was it discontinued? was it invented by Frangos et al.?
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