The overall goal of this procedure is to generate engineered muscle tissues. This is accomplished by first culturing satellite cells or a myoblast cell line to achieve the required number of cells. The second step is to make the anchoring points.
Next, the cells are mixed with a gel and the resulting mixture is cast between the anchoring points. The final step is to differentiate the cells into muscle tissue. Ultimately, electrical stimulation can be used to induce contractions of the cells and fluorescent staining and fluorescent or confocal microscopy can be used to detect the sarcomeric organization of the cytoskeleton in the differentiated muscle cells.
The main advantage of this technique over existing methods is that muscle cells will align in one direction in these tissues. This technique also has implications for patients that suffer from muscle loss. If we, for example, use patient's own cells in future to make these tissues, these can be used for transplantation purposes.
This method provides insight into the development of muscle and muscle damage, but it'll also provide insight for novel applications like regenerative medicine and e vitro cultured meat. Demonstrating the p