The roles of electrically driven water flow on cellular viability, tissue repair and polarity.

This project will investigate how electricity generates force to move water through the tiniest spaces in the human body. To support human life, water flow commonly occurs through thousands of miles of blood vessels to provide cells with nutrients and remove their waste products. In the absence of blood flow, cells suffocate or starve.

Electrically driven water flow between cells provides significant advantages over pressure driven flow for promoting cell survival in the absence of blood flow. This approach will be useful for promoting cell survival during tissue engineering prior to building of a new blood vessel network. This project may also reveal how electricity promotes healing of degenerative diseases caused by damaged or absent blood vessels.

As part of the educational broader impacts of this project, investigators will provide cross-disciplinary training for student researchers and provide professional development workshops for secondary-school science teachers to enhance their ability to integrate tissue engineering modules into their classrooms.

Soft tissue repair is often plagued by poor or absent blood flow, and interstitial flow in the extracellular matrix and around cells is lost. This project will characterize the effects of interstitial flow on cellular viability and proliferation using fluorescent assays, when interstitial flow is generated by electricity or pressure. In addition, mechanosensitive pathways used by cells to sense electrically driven water flow will be characterized using a combination of real-time fluorescence imaging and protein manipulation.

Finally, applied electric fields are well known to polarize cells in 2D culture but their usefulness in 3D culture is unknown. Electrically driven water flow will be tested to polarize cells in 3D culture, in order to help direct growth of new tissues required for repair of damaged tissues. Results from this work will be influential for guiding current medical interventions for soft tissue repair during physical therapies, surgical methods, and survival of tissues and organs during advanced tissue engineering.

The science and engineering supporting this research will also be used to promote tissue engineering modules for students in secondary education through a ‘teach the teachers’ training workshop.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.