Mechanical properties study of SW480 cells based on AFM

Abstract

Since the invention of the atomic force microscope (AFM), it has been widely applied in biomedicine. One of the most important applications is used as an indenter tool to do the indentation experiment in order to get the mechanical properties of cells. In this paper, SW480 cells were used as the test subjects. Through the analysis of the contact and indentation, Young's modulus (E), which is an important parameter of cancer cells, has been estimated. Experimental results show that different mechanical models should be chosen to calculate the E in different indentation depths. Here, the E of SW480 cells was (2.5 ± 0.8) KPa at the indentation depth of 99 nm.

Study of morphological and mechanical features of multinuclear and mononuclear SW480 cells by atomic force microscopy

“…Cancer treatment has been an important issue and great efforts have been devoted to the diagnosis and therapy of cancers (Babahosseini, Carmichael, Strobl, Mahmoodi, & Agah, ; Byun et al, ). Because of the nanoscale resolution of atomic force microscope (AFM) in the imaging, manipulation and measurement of biological objects and structures (Lazar et al, ; Nawaz et al, ; Sokolov, ; Xu et al, ; Zhang et al, ; Zhang, Aslan, Besenbacher, & Dong, ), it has been used to investigate morphological and mechanical features of living cells (Heu, Berquand, Elie‐Caille, & Nicod, ; Li, Mansoor, Tan, & Lim, ; Liu, Song, Qu, Wang, & Wang, ; Sikora & Iwan, ). Thus, AFM can be a proper tool for the manipulation and measurement of cancer cells.…”