Nephrocyte-neurocyte interaction and cellular metabolic analysis on membrane-integrated microfluidic device

Cell-cell interaction and cell metabolic analysis provide new opportunities for better understanding of critical biochemical processes. Advanced microfluidic technologies enable to create more realistic in vitro microenvironment by spatial and temporal control of cell growth and co-culture. In this work, we design a microfluidic device to achieve the co-culture of PC12 cells and 293 cells, and study in vitro cell-cell interaction via cell metabolic analysis by mass spectrometry. The membraneintegrated microfluidic device was firstly used for cell co-culture, and the cellular metabolite was further investigated by mass spectrometer(MS). Our results showed that the differentiation of PC12 cells could be successfully induced by m NGF and also greatly influenced by the microchannel treatment of fetal bovine serum(FBS) solution. The identification of cell morphology, microtubule-associated protein 2(MAP-2) expression and viability of differentiated PC12 cells were conducted before 293 cells being introduced into the top microfluidic channels and stimulated to secrete cell metabolism products. The developed microfluidic device is a potentially useful tool for high throughput of cell-cell interaction study.