Phenotypic responses to mechanical stress in fibroblasts from tendon, cornea and skin

Jennifer R Mackley , Joji Ando , Pawel Herzyk , Steven J Winder (1)

1 Department of Biomedical Science

Primary fibroblasts isolated from foetal mouse cornea, skin and tendon were subjected to linear shear stress and analysed for morphological parameters and by microarray as compared with unstimulated controls. Approximately 350 genes were either up or down regulated by a significant amount, with 51 of these being common to all 3 cell types. Approximately 50% of altered genes in tendon and cornea fibroblasts were changed in common with one of the other cell types, with the remaining approximately 50% being specific to tendon or cornea. In skin fibroblasts however, less than 25% of genes whose transcription was altered were specific only to skin. The functional spectrum of genes that were up or down regulated was diverse, with apparent house-keeping genes forming the major category of up-regulated genes, however a significant number of genes associated with cell adhesion, extracellular matrix and matrix remodeling, as well as cytokines and other signaling factors were also affected, somewhat surprisingly in these latter categories the trend was towards a reduction in mRNA levels. Verification of the mRNA quantity of a subset of these genes was performed by RT-PCR and was found to be in agreement with the microarray analysis. These findings provide the first in-depth analysis of phenotypic differences between fibroblast cells from different tissue sources and reveal the responses of these cells to mechanical stress.

Mots clés: Life Sciences

Jennifer R Mackley, Joji Ando, Pawel Herzyk, Steven J Winder. Phenotypic responses to mechanical stress in fibroblasts from tendon, cornea and skin. Biochemical Journal, 2006, 396 (2), pp.307-316. ⟨10.1042/BJ20060057⟩. ⟨hal-00478510⟩