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Putting Cells Where They Don’t Belong
Living cells possess an exquisite ability to sense and respond to physical information in their microenvironment. This ability plays a key role in many fundamentally important physiological and pathological processes. However, in our lab, we are curious to know what happens when cells to are exposed to highly artificial physical cues that are unlikely to exist in-vivo. In recent years our work has focussed on manipulating biological system through physical hacking (re-purposing biology using physical cues and physical manipulations). I will begin the talk by describing our work where we exploit highly artificial physical stimuli and micro-environments to initiate complex biological processes. I will then describe our development of “open source biomaterials”, specifically the utilization of apples and household goods to generate scaffolds capable of supporting 3D cell growth and proliferation in-vitro and in-vivo. The ultimate direction of the work in our lab is to understand the limits of biology by creating functional biological composites, objects and tissues that are not normally found in nature. |
Andrew Pelling
University of Ottawa |