Tropes

www.medgadget.com 2015 00535.txt.txt

#Scientists Turbo Charge Atomic Force Microscope to Watch Living Breast cancer Cells Changes in the physical properties of individual cells can point to how theye developing and being influenced by varying chemical compounds and other conditions. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) allows researchers to measure the viscoelastic properties of individual cells, but this technique has been too slow and could only monitor small numbers of cells. Researchers at Purdue University have unveiled a new technique that can harness just about any atomic force microscope to be able to watch the changing dynamics of large groups of live cells at high spatial and temporal resolutions. The method is about twenty times faster than was possible before with atomic force microscopy when imaging live cells and was used to monitor how a specific protein affects how breast cancer cells spread. Although it still seemingly slow by some standards, producing an image about every 50 seconds, it is a giant leap over the 15 to 20 minutes that was required previously to capture one shot. More from the study abstract in journal Scientific Reports: We present a technique that allows commercial AFM systems to map quantitatively the dynamically changing viscoelastic properties of live eukaryotic cells at widely separated frequencies over large areas (several 10 of microns) with spatial resolution equal to amplitude-modulation (AM-AFM) and with image acquisition times (tens of seconds) approaching those of speckle fluorescence methods. This represents a 20 fold improvement in nanomechanical imaging throughput compared to AM-AFM and is fully compatible with emerging high speed AFM systems. This method is used to study the spatiotemporal mechanical response of MDA-MB-231 breast carcinoma cells to the inhibition of Syk protein tyrosine kinase giving insight into the signaling pathways by which Syk negatively regulates motility of highly invasive cancer cells. Study in journal Scientific Reports: Fast, multi-frequency, and quantitative nanomechanical mapping of live cells using the atomic force microscope o

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