22–27 Jun 2025
Couvent des Jacobins
Europe/Paris timezone

Dielectrophoresis of mesenchymal stem cells in differentiation: A tool for cell characterization and cell sorting.

23 Jun 2025, 10:00
30m
La Nef (Couvent des Jacobins)

La Nef

Couvent des Jacobins

Speaker

Leslie Vallet

Description

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are adult multipotent stem cells naturally able to give rise to different cell types of connective tissue, but also to other specialized cell types under certain conditions. MSCs also exhibit interesting secretory activities, or can even come to the rescue of damaged cells in their environment. Therefore, the use of MSCs in regenerative therapies has attracted considerable interest over the last decades. However, MSC populations exhibit high heterogeneity, which adds complexity to their study in vitro as well as in clinical applications. When transplanted into the body, lack of appropriate cell homing, cell death and rapid clearance, or inappropriate differentiation are limiting factors for the efficiency of MSC-based therapeutic applications. Therefore, the characterization of properties specific to MSCs in differentiation compared to their undifferentiated counterpart, which could lead to the development of non-damaging cell separation methods, would benefit both research and clinical applications. Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is a label-free, rapid processing technique that can be used to characterize the electrical and dielectric properties of the cells and to perform cell electromanipulation without causing cell damage. Using a 3DEP system (LABtech, UK), we evaluated the dielectrophoretic behavior of MSCs during their adipogenic and osteogenic differentiation, acquiring DEP spectra (20 frequencies between 10kHz and 40MHz) at each week of differentiation. Very interestingly, we observed a significant decrease in both membrane permittivity and conductivity in both osteogenic and adipogenic differentiation pathways, as early as in the first week of differentiation, before the appearance of any morphological changes. Later, the evolution of these parameters was less significant. Some other cell properties affecting the dielectrophoretic behavior evolved throughout the differentiation process. In light of these observations, simulations have shown that DEP in combination with a microfluidic channel can be used to perform cell separation of differentiating cells from the first week of the differentiation process. This approach would have the potential to isolate either pure populations of undifferentiated MSCs or populations of pre-differentiated cells devoid of undifferentiated MSCs.

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