Are human-based materials de future of 3D cell cultures?: A comparative study with the currently available animal-based materials

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Inês Barbosa da
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/37834
• topic: 3D cell cultures; Human-based biomaterias; Animal-based-biomaterials; Platelet lysates; Basement membrane hydrogels; Omics tecnologies; Lipidomics

Animal-based scaffolds, such as the basement membrane (BM) hydrogels Matrigel® or Geltrex™, are currently the most common choice in three-dimensional (3D) cell culture. However, these encounter several disadvantages due to their animal origin. Human-based scaffolds, like the methacryloyl platelet lysate (PLMA)-based biomaterials, offer a xeno-free environment, representing a promising alternative. PLMA-based biomaterials are innovative scaffolds for cell culture with enormous potential, due to its increased stability and tunable physical properties. The environment is known to influence cell behavior and, although still an underexploited filed, omics technologies have been applied to better understand the influence of human and animal-based environments on the molecular profile of cells in culture. In this work, human adipose derived stem cells (hASCs) were cultured in two different 3D culture systems, PLMA-based sponges and BM hydrogels from Geltrex™. Their lipidomic profile was analyzed by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and compared to the lipidomic profile of freshly isolated hASCs. It was hypothesized that the human environment provided by PLMA-based sponges would be more suitable for the culture of human cells, in comparison to the standard animal-derived materials. Our results show that when cultured in PLMA sponges, hASCs have a closer profile of membrane phospholipids, particularly phosphatidylcholines, the most abundant phospholipid in all cell membranes, to the one expected to be found in vivo. Nonetheless, it was also noted a significantly higher abundance of triglycerides (TG) in the same cells, when compared to freshly isolated hASCs. Moreover, a non-expected closer proximity was encountered between the lipidomic profile of hASCs grown in BM hydrogel and the freshly isolated hASCs. Noteworthy, when removing TGs form the data analysis, the hASCs cultured in PLMA presented a lipidomic profile more similar to the freshly isolated cells. Thus, our results show that, if excluding the TGs from the analysis, PLMA sponges were able to indeed present a more suitable environment to mimic the in vivo conditions. This work highlights the importance of additional studies on the connection between the environment and the molecular profile of cultured cells, for the future of human-based biomaterials in 3D cell cultures.