Microfluidics-Chip for Plant Cells
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What was the question behind this work? Life is communication. The cells of an organism, but also different organisms are in continuous mutual exchange. Only by this way, Life can organise itself without the need for a Big Boss. We are familiar with the electrical communication of our nerve cells - however, the lion's share of cellular communication is brought about by chemistry. There is negotiating, but also cheating, tossing out of context, and responding. Can we listen to this chemical dialogue and perhaps even steer it one day? How did we approach this question? In cooperation with the team of Prof. Dr. Guber at the Institute for Mikrostructure Technology at the Campus North we have developed over years a microfluidic chip for plant cells. This allows co-cultivating different cells together, such that chemical communication is possible, while physical distance is kept. What came out? In our newest work we investigate exemplarily, what one can do with this chip system. We show that lonely plant cells stop dividing, but can be motivated by the chip to reinstall proliferation, when they sense, through the compounds in the microfluidic stream that other cells are around (Quorum Sensing). We show further that the chip allows to study, how fungi that associate with the Esca Syndrome (a grapevine disease that turns into a threat due to climate change) respond to the presence of plant cells by generating toxins. In a third application we play metabolic LEGO and combine two different cell lines from the medicinal plant Catharanthus roseus into a team to generate by synergy vindoline, the immediate pre-cursor of the precious anti-tumour compounds vinblastin and vincristine. The chip represents an important milestone in our Interreg project DialogProTec. Publication 172. Finkbeiner T, Manz C, Raorane M, Metzger C, Schmidt-Speicher L, Shen N, Ahrens R, Maisch J, Nick P, Guber A (2021) A modular microfluidic bioreactor to investigate plant cell-cell interactions. Protoplasma 259, 173-186 - pdf |