Journal
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-64259-y
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Whitcome Pre-doctoral Training Program
- UCLA Molecular Biology Institute
- AHA Award [18POST34080342]
- University of Utah Office of the Vice President for Research
- NIH [T32CA009120, R21CA227480, R01GM127985, R01GM114188, R01CA185189, P30CA016042]
- UCLA BSCRC-CNSI Nano-Medicine Initiative Award
- David Geffen School of Medicine Seed Award
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research [FA9550-15-1-0406]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The viscoelastic properties of mammalian cells can vary with biological state, such as during the epithelial-to-mesenchymal (EMT) transition in cancer, and therefore may serve as a useful physical biomarker. To characterize stiffness, conventional techniques use cell contact or invasive probes and as a result are low throughput, labor intensive, and limited by probe placement. Here, we show that measurements of biomass fluctuations in cells using quantitative phase imaging (QPI) provides a probe-free, contact-free method for quantifying changes in cell viscoelasticity. In particular, QPI measurements reveal a characteristic underdamped response of changes in cell biomass distributions versus time. The effective stiffness and viscosity values extracted from these oscillations in cell biomass distributions correlate with effective cell stiffness and viscosity measured by atomic force microscopy (AFM). This result is consistent for multiple cell lines with varying degrees of cytoskeleton disruption and during the EMT. Overall, our study demonstrates that QPI can reproducibly quantify cell viscoelasticity.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available