Effects of Directional Oscillatory Shear Index on Endothelial Cell Proliferation and Morphology Available to Purchase

The effects of hemodynamic forces on cellular responses have been studied for the last three decades. Wall shear stresses (WSS) are commonly accepted as an important factor affecting anchored cells subjected to fluid flow [1, 2]. Parallel plate flow chambers and cone and plate apparatuses, which are commonly used to generate controlled shear, are limited in that only one experimental condition can be explored at a time. On the other hand, orbital shakers can be used to investigate several cases simultaneously since many culture dishes can fit on its platform. A remaining challenge, however, is that shear generated in dishes on orbital shakers is two-dimensional, nonuniform and is oscillatory in nature, and can be described analytically [3, 4] for only a few limited conditions. In this project, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is applied to overcome those limitations by modeling the fluid flow in an orbiting petri dish for a range of conditions. In addition, cells grown under the same flow conditions were monitored for proliferation and morphology. A new directional oscillatory shear index (DOSI) is proposed to quantify the bidirectionality of oscillating shear. Cell proliferation, area, shape index and aspect ratio were investigated for different DOSI at different shear magnitudes.