Introduction

The growth plate has a foundational role in bone growth and development. Proper development of this structure is quintessential for normal postnatal human development, as it dictates the length and alignment of our skeletal structure through a process called endochondral ossification. In children, fractures often occur in or around the growth plate and can disrupt normal processes of growth, resulting in malalignment of bone or halted growth altogether. Currently, malalignment can be treated by stapling or using tension plate bands to hold portions of the growth plate in place and force realignment by growth on the opposite side. In adults, endochondral ossification for bone fusion often encounters problems of nonunion where failure of fusion occurs due to different external factors such as smoking. However, exactly what is going wrong in the microenvironment in these diseased states is largely unknown.

Within the research community, better treatments for traumatic injuries, such as the ones discussed above, are being investigated using the growth plates ability to generate bone, initiated by cartilage matrix deposition. However, there is currently no efficient and translatable experimental model for culturing the growth plate that is permissive of imaging and cell tracking that will permit researchers to better understand the cell fate progression of chondrocytes. This is largely due to the difficulties in providing the complex growth environment to induce the transcription factors necessary for maintenance of the growth plate’s different cell-laden zones in a manner that can be monitored by high resolution real-time microscopy. Here, we propose a design that will allow for development of the growth plate in a controlled manipulable chemical environment that will facilitate visualization with epifluorescence microscopy, and which should also be usable for multi-photon microscopy.

Overview