Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/11/2015
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Title: The Physical Biohack â?? Exploiting Physical Information to Control Cells and Tissues

Speaker: Dr. Andrew Pelling

Institute: University of Ottawa

Location: ABB 102

Description:

Living cells possess an exquisite ability to sense and respond to physical information in their microenvironment. This ability plays a key role in many fundamental physiological and pathological processes. For several years, my lab has focussed on utilizing a variety of optical and biophysical approaches to understand and quantify the dynamic responses of cells to mechanical stimuli and how physical cues can be employed to manipulate biological processes. Building on this work we are now exploring the possibilities of controlling biological systems through physical biohacking – the use of physical stimuli to augment and re-purpose living systems without genetic or biochemical tools. I will begin this talk by describing how one can exploit the shape and topography of the cellular microenvironment to initiate complex biochemical signalling and 3D organization. This work highlights how simple topographical cues can direct cellular organization, sorting and complex morphogenesis in 3D. I will then present our work in which we exploit the shape of plant cellulose ultrastructures to create scaffolds capable of supporting the growth of hybrid plant-animal artificial tissues. Moreover, such scaffolds form a class of â??open source biomaterialâ? that are capable of supporting 3D cell growth and proliferation in-vitro and in-vivo at very low cost. Our work has yielded new mechanistic insights into how cells are able to sense and respond to the physical cues in their microenvironment. Moreover, we are now working to exploit these insights to control and direct the growth of complex 3D multi-cellular constructs in response to simple physical cues. Ultimately, the lab aims to use these approaches to create functional biological composites and tissues that are not normally found in nature, without resorting to genetic manipulation.