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Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) has been the pivotal materials for microfluidic technologies with tremendous amount of lab-on-a-chip devices made of PDMS microchannels. While molding-based soft-lithography approach has been extremely successful in preparing various PDMS constructs, some complex features have to been achieved through more complicated microfabrication techniques that involve dry etching of PDMS. Several recipes have been reported for reactive ion etching (RIE) of PDMS; however, the etch rates present large variations, even for the same etching recipe, which poses challenges in adopting this process for device fabrication. Through systematic characterization of the Young's modulus of PDMS films and RIE etch rate, we show that the etch rate is closely related to the polymer cross-link density in the PDMS with a higher etch rate for a lower PDMS Young's modulus. Our results could provide guidance to the fabrication of microfluidic devices involving dry etching of PDMS.

Consumption of a high-fat, high-sugar diet and sedentary lifestyle are correlated with bulk arterial stiffening. While measurements of bulk arterial stiffening are used to assess cardiovascular health clinically, they cannot account for changes to the tissue occurring on the cellular scale. The compliance of the subendothelial matrix in the intima mediates vascular permeability, an initiating step in atherosclerosis. High-fat, high-sugar diet consumption and a sedentary lifestyle both cause micro-scale subendothelial matrix stiffening, but the impact of these factors in concert remains unknown. In this study, mice on a high-fat, high-sugar diet were treated with aerobic exercise or returned to a normal diet. We measured bulk arterial stiffness through pulse wave velocity and subendothelial matrix stiffness ex vivo through atomic force microscopy. Our data indicate that while diet reversal mitigates high-fat, high-sugar diet-induced macro- and micro-scale stiffening, exercise only significantly decreases micro-scale stiffness and not macro-scale stiffness, during the time-scale studied. These data underscore the need for both healthy diet and exercise to maintain vascular health. These data also indicate that exercise may serve as a key lifestyle modification to partially reverse the deleterious impacts of high-fat, high-sugar diet consumption, even while macro-scale stiffness indicators do not change.

Basement membranes (BMs), a specialized form of extracellular matrix, underlie nearly all cell layers and provide structural support for tissues and interact with cell surface receptors to determine cell behavior. Both macromolecular composition and stiffness of the BM influence cell-BM interactions. Collagen IV is a major constituent of the BM that forms an extensively cross-linked oligomeric network. Its deficiency leads to BM mechanical instability, as observed with glomerular BM in Alport syndrome. These findings have led to the hypothesis that collagen IV and its cross-links determine BM stiffness. A sulfilimine bond (S = N) between a methionine sulfur and a lysine nitrogen cross-links collagen IV and is formed by the matrix enzyme peroxidasin. In peroxidasin knockout mice with reduced collagen IV sulfilimine cross-links, we find a reduction in renal tubular BM stiffness. Thus this work provides the first direct experimental evidence that collagen IV sulfilimine cross-links contribute to BM mechanical properties and provides a foundation for future work on the relationship of BM mechanics to cell function in renal disease.
Copyright © 2017 the American Physiological Society.

Tissue-level mechanical properties characterize mechanical behavior independently of microscopic porosity. Specifically, quasi-static nanoindentation provides measurements of modulus (stiffness) and hardness (resistance to yielding) of tissue at the length scale of the lamella, while dynamic nanoindentation assesses time-dependent behavior in the form of storage modulus (stiffness), loss modulus (dampening), and loss factor (ratio of the two). While these properties are useful in establishing how a gene, signaling pathway, or disease of interest affects bone tissue, they generally do not vary with aging after skeletal maturation or with osteoporosis. Heterogeneity in tissue-level mechanical properties or in compositional properties may contribute to fracture risk, but a consensus on whether the contribution is negative or positive has not emerged. In vivo indentation of bone tissue is now possible, and the mechanical resistance to microindentation has the potential for improving fracture risk assessment, though determinants are currently unknown.

Electrospun microfibers are attractive for the engineering of oriented tissues because they present instructive topographic and mechanical cues to cells. However, high-density microfiber networks are too cell-impermeable for most tissue applications. Alternatively, the distribution of sparse microfibers within a three-dimensional hydrogel could present instructive cues to guide cell organization while not inhibiting cell behavior. In this study, thin (∼5 fibers thick) layers of aligned microfibers (0.7 μm) were embedded within collagen hydrogels containing mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), cultured for up to 14 days, and assayed for expression of ligament markers and imaged for cell organization. These microfibers were generated through the electrospinning of polycaprolactone (PCL), poly(ester-urethane) (PEUR), or a 75/25 PEUR/PCL blend to produce microfiber networks with elastic moduli of 31, 15, and 5.6 MPa, respectively. MSCs in composites containing 5.6 MPa fibers exhibited increased expression of the ligament marker scleraxis and the contractile phenotype marker α-smooth muscle actin versus the stiffer fiber composites. Additionally, cells within the 5.6 MPa microfiber composites were more oriented compared to cells within the 15 and 31 MPa microfiber composites. Together, these data indicate that the mechanical properties of microfiber/collagen composites can be tuned for the engineering of ligament and other target tissues. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part A: 104A: 1894-1901, 2016.
© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Cancer patients frequently develop skeletal metastases that significantly impact quality of life. Since bone metastases remain incurable, a clearer understanding of molecular mechanisms regulating skeletal metastases is required to develop new therapeutics that block establishment of tumors in bone. While many studies have suggested that the microenvironment contributes to bone metastases, the factors mediating tumors to progress from a quiescent to a bone-destructive state remain unclear. In this study, we hypothesized that the "soil" of the bone microenvironment, specifically the rigid mineralized extracellular matrix, stimulates the transition of the tumor cells to a bone-destructive phenotype. To test this hypothesis, we synthesized 2D polyurethane (PUR) films with elastic moduli ranging from the basement membrane (70 MPa) to cortical bone (3800 MPa) and measured expression of genes associated with mechanotransduction and bone metastases. We found that expression of Integrin β3 (Iβ3), as well as tumor-produced factors associated with bone destruction (Gli2 and parathyroid hormone related protein (PTHrP)), significantly increased with matrix rigidity, and that blocking Iβ3 reduced Gli2 and PTHrP expression. To identify the mechanism by which Iβ3 regulates Gli2 and PTHrP (both are also known to be regulated by TGF-β), we performed Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) and immunoprecipitation, which indicated that Iβ3 co-localized with TGF-β Receptor Type II (TGF-β RII) on rigid but not compliant films. Finally, transplantation of tumor cells expressing Iβ3 shRNA into the tibiae of athymic nude mice significantly reduced PTHrP and Gli2 expression, as well as bone destruction, suggesting a crucial role for tumor-produced Iβ3 in disease progression. This study demonstrates that the rigid mineralized bone matrix can alter gene expression and bone destruction in an Iβ3/TGF-β-dependent manner, and suggests that Iβ3 inhibitors are a potential therapeutic approach for blocking tumor transition to a bone destructive phenotype.
Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Acquisition of ultrasound data negatively affects image registration accuracy during image-guided therapy because of tissue compression by the probe. We present a novel compression correction method that models sub-surface tissue displacement resulting from application of a tracked probe to the tissue surface. Patient landmarks are first used to register the probe pose to pre-operative imaging. The ultrasound probe geometry is used to provide boundary conditions to a biomechanical model of the tissue. The deformation field solution of the model is inverted to non-rigidly transform the ultrasound images to an estimation of the tissue geometry before compression. Experimental results with gel phantoms indicated that the proposed method reduced the tumor margin modified Hausdorff distance (MHD) from 5.0 ± 1.6 to 1.9 ± 0.6 mm, and reduced tumor centroid alignment error from 7.6 ± 2.6 to 2.0 ± 0.9 mm. The method was applied to a clinical case and reduced the tumor margin MHD error from 5.4 ± 0.1 to 2.6 ± 0.1 mm and the centroid alignment error from 7.2 ± 0.2 to 3.5 ± 0.4 mm.
Copyright © 2014 World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

An important concern in the study of fracture healing is the ability to assess mechanical integrity in response to candidate therapeutics in small-animal systems. In recent reports, it has been proposed that microCT image-derived densitometric parameters could be used as a surrogate for mechanical property assessment. Recently, we have proposed an inverse methodology that iteratively reconstructs the modulus of elasticity of the lumped soft callus/hard callus region by integrating both intrinsic mechanical property (from biomechanical testing) and geometrical information (from microCT) within an inverse finite element analysis (FEA) to define a callus quality measure. In this paper, data from a therapeutic system involving mesenchymal stem cells is analyzed within the context of comparing traditional microCT densitometric and mechanical property metrics. In addition, a novel multi-parameter regression microCT parameter is analyzed as well as our inverse FEA metric. The results demonstrate that the inverse FEA approach was the only metric to successfully detect both longitudinal and therapeutic responses. While the most promising microCT-based metrics were adequate at early healing states, they failed to track late-stage mechanical integrity. In addition, our analysis added insight to the role of MSCs by demonstrating accelerated healing and was the only metric to demonstrate therapeutic benefits at late-stage healing. In conclusion, the work presented here indicates that microCT densitometric parameters are an incomplete surrogate for mechanical integrity. Additionally, our inverse FEA approach is shown to be very sensitive and may provide a first-step towards normalizing the often challenging process of assessing mechanical integrity of healing fractures.
Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD) results in impaired function through the inability of valves to fully open and close, but the causes of this pathology are unknown. Stiffening of the aorta is associated with CAVD and results in exposing the aortic valves to greater mechanical strain. Transforming growth factor β1 (TGF-β1) is enriched in diseased valves and has been shown to combine with strain to synergistically alter aortic valve interstitial cell (AVIC) phenotypes. Therefore, we investigated the role of strain and TGF-β1 on the calcification of AVICs. Following TGF-β1 pretreatment, strain induced intact monolayers to aggregate and calcify. Using a wound assay, we confirmed that TGF-β1 increases tension in the monolayer in parallel with α-smooth muscle actin (αSMA) expression. Continual exposure to strain accelerates aggregates to calcify into mature nodules that contain a necrotic core surrounded by an apoptotic ring. This phenotype appears to be mediated by strain inhibition of AVIC migration after the initial formation of aggregates. To better interpret the extent to which externally applied strain physically impacts this process, we modified the classical Lamé solution, derived using principles from linear elasticity, to reveal strain magnification as a novel feature occurring in a mechanical environment that supports nodule formation. These results indicate that strain can impact multiple points of nodule formation: by modifying tension in the monolayer, remodeling cell contacts, migration, apoptosis, and mineralization. Therefore, strain-induced nodule formation provides new directions for developing strategies to address CAVD.

The incidence of soft tissue deformation has been well documented in neurosurgical procedures and is known to compromise the spatial accuracy of image-guided surgery systems.Within the context of image-guided liver surgery (IGLS), no detailed method to study and analyze the observed organ shape change between preoperative imaging and the intra-operative presentation has been developed. Contrary to the studies of deformation in neurosurgical procedures, the majority of deformation in IGLS is imposed prior to resection and due to laparotomy and mobilization. As such, methods of analyzing the organ shape change must be developed to use the intra-operative data (e.g. laser range scan (LRS) surfaces) acquired with the organ in its fully deformed shape. To achieve this end we use a signed closest point distance deformation metric computed after rigid alignment of the intra-operative LRS data with organ surfaces generated from the preoperative tomograms. The rigid alignment between the intra-operative LRS surfaces and pre-operative image data was computed with a feature weighted surface registration algorithm. In order to compare the deformation metrics across patients, an inter-patient non-rigid registration of the pre-operative CT images was performed. Given the inter-patient liver registrations, an analysis was performed to determine the potential similarities in the distribution of measured deformation between patients for which similar procedures had been performed. The results of the deformation measurement and analysis indicates the potential for soft tissue deformation to compromise surgical guidance information and suggests a similarity in imposed deformation among similar procedure types.