Application of Bioimaging to Osteocyte Biology

Abstract

In a variety of scientific fields, it is helpful to visualize natural phenomena. Newly developed methods of visualization often lead to breakthroughs in scientific fields. Especially, in the bioscience field, it is significant to reveal temporal-spatial responses in cells while visualizing molecular phenomena. Such visualization may provide information to help understand cellular behavior in response to an extracellular stimulus. Although osteocytes are the most abundant cells in bone, it has been difficult to study their biological nature because they are embedded in hard bone tissue. So, the real 3D structure of osteocytes was not clarified until recently. On the other hand, a newly developed technique of visualization was recently introduced into bone cell biology. In this review, we introduce and review our application of a bioimaging technique to reveal the morphology of osteocytes as well as part of their biological nature.