The process of skeletogenesis during embryonic development involves sor cells, all taking place in a highly dynamic environment. The overall and pressures that are hypothesized development. However, details of these mechanical cues are not well understood, ments that could address these of early skeletal development in vitro. To strain on embryonic skeletal precursor cells in micromass culture....

The standard culture system for in vitro cartilage research is based on cells in a three-dimensional micromass culture and a defined medium containing the chondrogenic key growth factor, transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1. The aim of this study was to optimize the medium for chondrocyte micromass culture. Human chondrocytes were cultured in different media formulations, designed with a factori...

The objective of this study was to assess whether nucleotides supplementation in vitro could suppress ethanol-induced developmental toxicity in mouse. The models of whole embryo culture (WEC) and midbrain (MB) cell micromass culture were used in this study. In WEC system, exposure to 4.0 mg/mL ethanol for 48 h yielded various developmental malformations of the mice embryos. Nucleotides suppleme...

In the present study we have used radiometric thin layer chromatography (TLC) and radioimmunoassay (RIA) to examine the synthesis of various prostaglandins (PGs) during the progressive chondrogenic differentiation limb mesenchymal cells undergo in micromass culture. Throughout the 3-day culture period, [3H]arachidonic acid (AA) is metabolized to compounds which comigrate with authentic PGE2, PG...

The effects of creatine (Cr) supplementation on primary rat osteoblast-like cells cultured as monolayer and micromass were investigated. Cr was added to the medium at concentrations of either 10 or 20 mM. At various time points, the cell cultures were analyzed morphologically, metabolically and biochemically. The degree of differentiation of primary osteoblast-like cell cultures was higher in m...

Human adipose-derived stem cells have shown chondrogenic differentiation potential in cartilage tissue engineering in combination with natural and synthetic biomaterials. In the present study, we hypothesized that porous aqueous-derived silk protein scaffolds would be suitable for chondrogenic differentiation of human adipose-derived stem cells. Human adipose-derived stem cells were cultured up...

1. Introduction Since Solursh and his coworkers set up the limb bud micromass cultures in 1977 (1), this procedure has become a major model to analyze cellular and molecular event involved in chondrogenesis (2–7). Recently, RCAS retroviral vectors have been developed that can infect chicken embryos in ovo. These have advanced our understanding in limb bud patterning remarkably (8). Here we desc...

Tissue engineering of bone and cartilage tissue for subsequent implantation is of growing interest in cranio- and maxillofacial surgery. Commonly it is performed by using cells coaxed with scaffolds. Recently, there is a controversy concerning the use of artificial scaffolds compared to the use of a natural matrix. Therefore, new approaches called micromass technology have been invented to over...

We present a stochastic cellular automaton model for the behavior of limb bud precartilage mesenchymal cells undergoing chondrogenic patterning. This "agent-oriented" model represents cells by points on a lattice that obey rules motivated by experimental findings. The "cells" follow these rules as autonomous agents, interacting with other cells and with the microenvironments cell activities pro...

Bone morphogenetic protein 4 (BMP4) induces, whereas epidermal growth factor (EGF) inhibits chondrogenesis. We hypothesize that BMP4 and EGF mediated intracellular signals are both coupled in the regulation of Meckel's cartilage development. Two chondrogenic experimental model systems were employed to test the hypothesis: (1) an ex vivo, serum-free, organ culture system for mouse embryonic mand...