MICROFLUIDIC DEVICE FOR EXAMINING DIRECTIONAL SENSING IN DENDRITIC CELL CHEMOTAXIS.

Dendritic cell chemotaxis is an important process involved in the acquisition of adaptive immunity. Despite several studies, our understanding of this process remains limited. One of the reasons for this is the lack of experimental models that give us real-time information on dendritic cell locomotion. Here, using tools in microfluidics, we have fabricated a microdevice that allows us to monitor dendritic cell migration in a chemokine gradient in real time. We successfully observed the migration of dendritic cells derived from a myeloid leukemia cell line (MUTZ-3) in a soluble chemokine (CCL-19) gradient. Our experiments suggest the utility of microdevices in monitoring dendritic cell chemotaxis in real time and getting important information regarding migration speeds and distances previously not available from conventional chemotaxis assays. This kind of data is useful for building mechanistic mathematical models of dendritic cell chemotaxis that may give us novel insights to the process of dendritic cell chemotaxis.