How the morphologies of progenitor and mature osteocytes contributes to their mechanotransduction

A dual experimental and numerical top-down approach is applied to investigate the link between the osteocyte morphology and their mechanical perception of the environment at the progenitor and mature stages. The numerical model is based on explicit tissue morphology discretization to identify bone in situ diffuse damage at the cellular scale. The 3D morphology of a human mature osteocyte was reconstructed from deconvoluted confocal microscopy observations. The in vitro experimental model presents Live Allograft Bone Systems (LABS) where a patient progenitor (bm hMSC) or mature (MLOY4) osteocytes were reseeded into fresh human donor cortical bone tissues. The system was subjected to mechanical loading and simultaneously progenitor and mature cell specific possible calcium mediated cell signaling responses were measured by fluorescent flow cytometry using CFSE labeling