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High-speed broadband monitoring of cell viscoelasticity in real time shows myosin-dependent oscillations

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Abstract

Study of the dynamic evolutions of cell viscoelasticity is important as during cell activities such as cell metastasis and invasion, the rheological behaviors of the cells also change dynamically, reflecting the biophysical and biochemical connections between the outer cortex and the intracellular structures. Although the time variations of the static modulus of cells have been investigated, few studies have been reported on the dynamic variations of the frequency-dependent viscoelasticity of cells. Measuring and monitoring such dynamic evolutions of cells at nanoscale can be challenging as the measurement needs to meet two objectives inherently contradictory to each other—the measurement must be broadband (to cover a large frequency spectrum) but also rapid (to capture the time-elapsed changes). In this study, we exploited a recently developed control-based nanomechanical protocol of atomic force microscope to monitor in real time the dynamic evolutions of the viscoelasticity of live human prostate cancer cells (PC-3 cells) and study its dependence on myosin activities. We found that the viscoelasticity of PC-3 cells, followed the power law, and oscillated at a period of about 200 s. Both the amplitude and the frequency of the oscillation strongly depended on the intracellular calcium and blebbistatin-sensitive motor proteins.

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Acknowledgements

Ren’s and Zou’s part of work in this project was funded by NSF Grant DBI-1353890, and Yan’s part of the work was supported by the China Scholarship Council.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

    Bo Yan

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Juan Ren

  3. Department of Biochemical Biology, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Xi Zheng & Yue Liu

  4. Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, Rutgers University, 98 Brett Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA

    Qingze Zou

Authors
  1. Bo Yan
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  2. Juan Ren
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  3. Xi Zheng
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  4. Yue Liu
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  5. Qingze Zou
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Contributions

BY performed the AFM experiment and participated in the data analysis, JR participated in the experiment and the maniscript writing and performed the data analysis, XZ participated in the design of the experiment and guided the sample preparation and treatment, YL performed the cell sample preparation and treatment, and QZ designed the experiment, participated in the data analysis, and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Qingze Zou.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Bo Yan and Juan Ren were with Zou’s group, and contributed equally during this work.

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Yan, B., Ren, J., Zheng, X. et al. High-speed broadband monitoring of cell viscoelasticity in real time shows myosin-dependent oscillations. Biomech Model Mechanobiol 16, 1857–1868 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10237-017-0924-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10237-017-0924-4

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