hi im a new researcher and is hoping for some opinion on this.
i am working on podocytes cells, which are part of the glomerulus of kidney. They are therefore exposed to glomerular pressure, and as such mechanical stress especially in glomerular hypertension. I would like to study the adaptation of these cells to mechanical stress and what i have in my institute is an apparatus that can stretch the cells. But the stretching paramaters involved slightly differs from what other researchers in published papers do. For instance, biaxial stretching is done but my apparatus can only stretch in 1 plane (uniaxial). Also, my apparatus applies continuous stretch but other researches use apparatus that can apply cyclic stretch (stretch and relaxation cycle). I believe the apparatus used by other researchers would better mimic the conditions in the kidney.
How then do i justify using this apparatus to study global phosphoproteomic response using mass spec? At the end of this 4 years (phd), will i get shoot down for using a simpler system?
or maybe i was thinking of looking at markers associated with mechanically stressed cells. If i see similar responses, can i better argue that indeed yes eventhough the apparatus is inferior in ways, it is still able to replicate mechanical stress in cells?
Dear Iwan, I don't work with your experimental system and I don't know how work the mechanical device that you mentioned. However, I suppose that this device is probably far of the real in vivo conditions. My point is if you cannot use ex-vivo or in-vivo whole systems (e.g., kidney perfusión, mice) to apply verosímil stimuli able to gun the mechanical (hydrodynamical) responses that you seek. After that, you could recover and analyze the podocytes by tissue dissection and include also some biomarkers. On the other hand, you know that in all tissues each celular type interacts with other cells, interchanging signals (inputs and outputs) forming an ecologic community. Hence, the study of isolated podacytes in vitro within the mechanical device can generate quite un-realistic results that the alternative study herein proposed.
Dear Iwan,
we use a so-called cell Trainer which kann be used in the ncubator sterilized and aplies Andy stress or Deformation pattern sinosidal, rectangular etc. to the cell. The System is based on the CellDrum which we developed. It easy to use and applies a biaxial strain to either cell monolayars or 3D cultures.
Contact me at [email protected]
Best wishes
Gerhard Artmann
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