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Stencell
 The ready-to-use sticky foil with compartments that you can use for cellular confinement. It is designed to standardize the experiments and to minimize the consumption of reagents.

Designed by Vincent Studer, Pierre-Olivier Strale and Aurélien Pasturel
 They were hosted by the Cell Organ-izers joint research laboratory (CNRS-Alvéole).

What is it for?  Use it if you are working with super expensive reagents or very rare cell lines, and you want to test various experimental hypothesis
How to use it? Check our simplified protocol
Why we chose it? Learn about the story of Stencell and us

  Features

Standardized, reproducible environment

Wound healing experiments are traditionaly done by scratching a confluent monolayer, leading to poor reproducibility and non-physiological starting conditions. Stencell guarantees a collective cell migration in standardized, reproducible environments

Removable multiwell stickers

Stencells are thin sheets of silicone that stick tightly to glass and most plastics with no need for glue, meaning they can be removed later on. This, combined with their multiwell format, can create removable boundaries between cell populations or allow you to simply run more experiments per sample.

Techniques

Wound-healing assay
Immuno-cyto-chemistry

  Gallery

 
 
COS-7 cells colonizing a gap induced by the removal of a PDMS stencil.
Images shot with a 20X objective during 18 hours (1 image every 2 min) with an inverted microscope.
Image credit: © Pierre-Olivier Strale

  Simplified protocol

Storage conditions 

  • Storage at room-temperature, stable up to one year.

Protocol of use

  • Wound-healing experiment in Stencell chambers
    1)     Using tweezers, discard the windows of a Stencell
    2)     Using tweezers, grab the Stencell and place it on your dedicated cell culture substrate (glass coverslip, plastic Petri dish, multiwells plate)
    3)     Optional: use a flat surface to make sure the Stencell properly stick to the cell culture substrate.
    4)     Immerse the sample in complete cell culture medium and place it in an incubator (37°C, 5% CO2).
    5)     Detach your cells according to your standard procedure, centrifuge.
    6)     Remove the bubbles present at the interface Stencell/cell cuture substrate using a pipette.
    7)     Seed the cells and place the sample back in the incubator until cells are spread and fully occupy the windows space.
    8)     Carrefully remove the Stencell using tweezers while maintaining one corner with a pipette.
    9)     Optional : Place the glass coverslip on its dedicated holder.
    10)   Image with a microscope at 37°C, 5% CO2.

  • lmmunostaining of cells confined in Stencell chambers
    1)  Using tweezers, discard the windows of your Stencell
    2)  Using tweezers, grab the Stencell and place it on your dedicated cell culture substrate (glass slide, plastic Petri dish, multiwells plate)
    3)  Optional : use a flat surface to make sure the Stencell properly stick to the cell culture substrate
    4)  Immerse the sample in complete cell culture medium and place it in an incubator (37°C, 5% CO2)
    5)  Detach your cells according to your standard procedure, centrifuge.
    6)  Remove the bubbles present at the interface Stencell/cell cuture substrate using a pipette.
    7)  Seed the cells and place the sample back in the incubator until cells are spread.
    8)  Fix with PFA 4% for 12min, rinse 3X with PBS.
    9)  Carrefully remove the Stencell using tweezers while maintaining one corner with a pipette.
    10)  Stain the cells with standard procedures.
    11)  Optional: Mount the glass coverslip on a glass slide.
    12)  Image on a fluorescence microscope.

 
 

Stencell and us

"We designed the Everspark buffer to facilitate sample preparation for dSTORM super-resolution imaging. Indeed, an oxygen-free buffer containing a thiol reducer is central to promote fluorophore blinking and thus single molecule detection, required for dSTORM imaging. With classical buffers, such as the Glox buffer, fluorophore blinking lifetime is limited to a few hours. With Everspark buffer, it is now possible to increase sample lifetime to several weeks. We demonstrated that a calibrated sample mounted once with the Everspark buffer can be submitted to several rounds of dSTORM imaging to acquire and reconstruct a structure reproducible in coverage and precision, over a period of two months."

Contact the team about their technology.

Odoo • Text and Image

Pierre-Olivier Strale, Aurélien Pasturel and Vincent Studer

 
Odoo • Image and Text Esther Graudens
New projects at Idylle

"Sometimes research needs a high level of versatility. This is exactly what appealed me when I met Vincent, Pierre-Olivier and Aurelien. They were hosted by the Cell Organ-izers joint research laboratory, set up by CNRS and our sister company Alveole. So they naturally turned to us when they decided to look for a partner to release their stencils. We knew that Stencell would be so useful to a lot of researchers who could save reagents and cells while testing new ideas and experimental conditions on small volumes. So we said yes immediately. On top of that, the three of them have proven to be highly reactive and proactive, engaged and enthusiastic. They love as much as we do testing new ideas and suggest others. It was a great pleasure to go through our industrial process together!"

Contact us about the way you test different experimental hypothesis
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