Shape Deformation Analysis of Single Cell in 3d Tissue Under Mechanical Stimuli

This paper describes an analytical platform to investigate the cell response against mechanical stimuli in in vitro 3D tissues. The system is capable of live-imaging cells in 3D tissues at a single cell level under mechanical stimuli, which makes this system similar to the in vivo environment and suitable for analysis of maturation mechanism. We succeeded in imaging various shapes of cells in 3D tissue under mechanical stimuli and observed that the stretch-induced deformation was distributed non-uniformly inside cells. We believe that our system could contribute to a further understanding of the tissue maturation mechanism induced by mechanical stimuli, which is highly useful for the development of tissue reconstruction.