RESEARCH ARTICLE
Cryomicroscopic Investigations of Freezing Processes in Cell Suspensions
Tathagata Acharya, Ram V. Devireddy*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 4
First Page: 26
Last Page: 35
Publisher ID: TOBIOTJ-4-26
DOI: 10.2174/1874070701004010026
Article History:
Received Date: 11/12/2009Revision Received Date: 02/02/2010
Acceptance Date: 09/03/2010
Electronic publication date: 11/5/2010
Collection year: 2010
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
This study evaluates the freezing response of three different cell types, Pacific oyster embryos (~50 µm in diameter), Jurkat cells and HeLa cells (~12 to 15 µm’s in diameter), using cryomicroscopy. Freezing experiments were performed on oyster embryos at cooling rates of either 5 or 10 °C/min, while Jurkats were cooled at either 1 or 10 °C/min and HeLa cells were cooled at either 1, 15 or 20 °C/min, respectively. The experiments with oyster embryos were primarily designed to investigate the phenomena of intracellular ice formation (IIF) while the experiments for Jurkat and HeLa cells were designed to investigate both cellular dehydration and IIF during freezing. IIF was characterized by the abrupt black flashing during the cooling steps while the cellular dehydration experiments were characterized by the volumetric (projected area) shrinkage of the cells during the cooling steps. Mathematical models were fit to the cellular dehydration data to obtain the Jurkat and HeLa cell membrane permeability (Lpg) at the reference temperature (273.15 K), the apparent activation energy of the cellular dehydration process (ELp) or the temperature dependence of Lpg. The temperature dependence of IIF in the oyster embryos, the Jurkat cells and the HeLa cells were also determined.