Investigation of the Extracellular Matrix Effect for the QCM/CCD Cell Activity Monitoring System

A real-time quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) cell activity monitoring system coupled with micro CCD cameras was developed to investigate the cultured cell activity, which could measure the viscoelastic characteristics of the cell with the QCM and observe the cell morphology changes with CCD camera simultaneously. Both the viscoelastic characteristics and the shape of the cultured cell are important factors to estimate the cell activity and the cell adhesion. The extracellular matrix (ECM) on the surface of the QCM is essential to culture the cell stably in the QCM monitoring system. To find the ECM optimization condition, the adhesive strength of cultured cells on the ECM modified glass surface was measured by using rotating water stream and CCD camera. After culturing HepG2 cells for 24 hours on the ECM modified glass plates, the glass plates were dipped in the PBS solution and rotated with 1,000, 1,300, and 1,500 rpm for 30 seconds. The adhesiveness of ECMs was investigated by calculating the remained cells after rotating. Four types of ECM, such as amino group, carboxyl group, collagen monomer, and collagen polymer, were used and tested. The current paper improves the sensing system of previous report so that measurements of four ECMs can be simultaneously conducted under the same conditions in order to enhance reliability. A collagen polymer exposed ECM was the most stable on an adhesiveness point of view, but not suitable for the QCM cell activity monitoring due to the decrease of the QCM sensitivity. The sensitivity of the QCM cell activity monitoring system using collagen monomer as ECM is about 2.6 times better than that using collagen polymer. A collagen monomer exposed ECM was more stable than amino group and carboxyl group exposed ECMs based on an adhesiveness point of view. Therefore, a collagen monomer exposed ECM was the most stable and suitable for the QCM cell activity monitoring system among the four ECMs. The changes of the resonance frequency and the resonance resistance of the ECM film with the cultured cells were investigated and compared the results of CCD camera images. From these results, we showed the QCM cell activity monitoring system coupled with the micro CCD camera could be applied to the evaluation of the cell activities.