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Full-Text Articles in Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering

Measuring The Mechanical Properties Of Living Cells Using Atomic Force Microscopy, Nancy Burnham, Gawain Thomas, Terri Camesano, Qi Wen Jun 2013

Measuring The Mechanical Properties Of Living Cells Using Atomic Force Microscopy, Nancy Burnham, Gawain Thomas, Terri Camesano, Qi Wen

Nancy A. Burnham

Mechanical properties of cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) play important roles in many biological processes including stem cell differentiation, tumor formation, and wound healing. Changes in stiffness of cells and ECM are often signs of changes in cell physiology or diseases in tissues. Hence, cell stiffness is an index to evaluate the status of cell cultures. Among the multitude of methods applied to measure the stiffness of cells and tissues, micro-indentation using an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) provides a way to reliably measure the stiffness of living cells. This method has been widely applied to characterize the micro-scale stiffness for …


Stiffness Of Measurement System And Significant Figures Of Displacement Which Are Required To Interpret Adhesional Force Curves, Nancy Burnham, Kunio Takahashi, Hubert Pollock, Tadao Onzawa Feb 1997

Stiffness Of Measurement System And Significant Figures Of Displacement Which Are Required To Interpret Adhesional Force Curves, Nancy Burnham, Kunio Takahashi, Hubert Pollock, Tadao Onzawa

Nancy A. Burnham

Force curves obtained from an elastic contact theory are shown and compared with experimental results. In the elastic contact theory, a pin-on-disk contact is assumed and the following interaction are taken into consideration; (i) elastic deformation, (ii) the specific energy of adhesion in the area of the contact, which is expressed as the difference between the surface energies and the interface energy, (iii) the long-range interaction outside the area of contact, assuming the additivity of the Lennard-Jones type potential, and (iv) another elastic term for the measurement system such as the cantilever stiffness of an atomic force microscope (AFM). In …