We have studied the factors that are important for producing functional retinal neurons from adult derived retinal stem and progenitor cells (RPCs) investigating the role of substrate stiffness or soluble factors in 2D and 3D culture on the differentiation and survival of RPCs. RPCs were cultured on agarose scaffolds modified with the adhesive peptides of varying stiffness. We observed that cell survival in the 0.75% matrix was greater in 3D than in 2D by a factor of 50% irrespective of the time in culture. We observed the presence of photoreceptors exclusively in 0.75% agarose, while the stiffer matrices (1.75%) led to retinal ganglion cell and glial cell differentiation with no significant difference in the differentiation profiles when cells were cultured in 2D vs. 3D. These data indicate that substrate stiffness, more than growth factors, has a significant impact on both the survival and differentiation profile of retinal precursor cells.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/25398 |
| Date | 14 December 2010 |
| Creators | Ahsan, Shoeb |
| Contributors | Morshead, Cindi M. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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