Permeability changes of the cell-contained microcapsules visualized by confocal laser scanning microscope

✍ Scribed by Guojun Lv; Zhijie Sun; Shuangyue Li; Weiting Yu; Yubing Xie; Ying Zhang; Hongguo Xie; Xiaoxia Li; Wei Wang; Xiaojun Ma

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 471 KB
• Volume: 90A
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1549-3296
• DOI: 10.1002/jbm.a.32115

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Microencapsulation of recombinant cells is a novel means for gene therapy. However, one of the major concerns is the relationship between the permeability of microcapsule and cell growth. Many studies have focused on the permeability of empty microcapsule, but little is known about the effect of the cell growth on the permeability of a cell‐contained microcapsule. A combination of fluorescence labeled protein and confocal laser scanning microscope (CLSM) provides the information about the permeability changes during the cell growth. A decrease of membrane permeability was detected on the 14th day. Meanwhile, membrane surface protein fouling was also investigated. A significant increase of membrane surface protein content was detected on the 21st day. In order to study the effect of the permeability changes on the cell viability, the membrane of cell‐contained microcapsules with different permeability was set up by incubating gel beads in poly‐L‐lysine for 5 and 30 min, respectively, to mimic the bovine serum albumin cutoff, and a retard of cell growth was found in 7 days' culture. These results showed that the protein fouling of the microcapsule membrane caused by the cell growth may be an important factor to influence cell viability. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res, 2009