2.3. Cell culture experiments
2.3.1. Cell culture
The normal human dermal fibroblasts (LF cells) were used for cell
culture experiments. The cells were maintained in Eagle's minimal essential
medium (provided by Institute of Molecular Genetics of the
ASCR) supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum (Sigma-Aldrich)
and gentamicin (Sigma-Aldrich) in an incubator at 37 °C and 3.5% CO2
atmosphere. Cells were then detached with trypsin and seeded into
sterilized observation chambers with glass bottom coverslips (two plasma
coated coverslips and one control). The seeding densities were 15
cells/mm2 in order to achieve sparse coverage for the purposes of segmentation
of individual cells. The observation chambers were kept in
the incubator under the same conditions.
2.3.2. Cell imaging
The samples (control, CPA40, CPA42 and CPA43) were imaged by
CCHM at three time instants, 2, 3 and 4 days, after cell seeding (with
the interval approximately 24 h). At least 30 images were acquired
from each sample at each time point in pursuit of collecting data for
the statistical analysis. Images were acquired in a random manner
across each sample. While acquiring images for extraction of cell morphological
parameters, objectives Nikon 10×/0.3 were used. The imaged
area when using these objectives is 379 × 379 μm2
. For the cell
count and confluence determination, Nikon 4×/0.1 objectives providing
the field of view 947 × 947 μm2 were used.
CCHM [27,28] was built at Brno University of Technology. The optical
set-up of the microscope is based on Mach–Zehnder-type interferometer
modified for incoherent off-axis holographic microscopy
(Fig. 2) [28].The illumination is formed by a halogen lamp as a low