Scaling the microrheology of living cells.

By B. Fabry, G. Maksym, J. Butler, M. Glogauer, D. Navajas, Jeffrey J. Fredberg. Physical Review Letters, 2001

1,188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report a scaling law that governs both the elastic and frictional properties of a wide variety of living cell types, over a wide range of time scales and under a variety of biological interventions. This scaling identifies these cells as soft glassy materials existing close to a glass transition, and implies that cytoskeletal proteins may regulate cell mechanical properties mainly by modulating the effective noise temperature of the matrix. The practical implications are that the effective noise temperature is an easily quantified measure of the ability of the cytoskeleton to deform, flow, and reorganize.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cell Biology, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/723cdf260a45fa4ec74f7c6924cf125ad9cecb3c

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In Biomedical Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

The bacterial cytoplasm has glass-like properties and is fluidized by metabolic activity (2013, background): “Aspects of glassiness have been reported in eukaryotic cells but have been attributed to the mechanical response of their Cell 156, 183–194, January 16, 2014 ª2014 Elsevier Inc. 191 extensive cytoskeletal network (Fabry et al., 2001).”
Modeling semiflexible polymer networks (2014, background): “Thus, in the GWLC model, the “plateau” regime is no longer flat but appears to increase with frequency as a weak power law, consistent with experiments on live cells (Deng et al., 2006; Fabry et al., 2001).”
APPLICATIONS OF MAGNETIC NANOPARTICLES IN BIOMEDICINE (2003, background): “Changing the direction of an appliedmagnetic field twists themicrosphere by ameasurable amount, which can then be related to the mechanical properties of the cell membrane and cytoskeleton [139–143].”
Microrheology of human lung epithelial cells measured by atomic force microscopy. (2003, methodology): “A physical basis of this power-law empiricism has recently been suggested by Fabry and co-workers (Fabry et al., 2001), who interpreted this model as a particular case of soft glassy rheology (SGR) (Sollich et al.”
Cell prestress. I. Stiffness and prestress are closely associated in adherent contractile cells. (2002, background): “Instead, it exhibits a weak power law dependence throughout a wide range of frequencies (17).”
Mechanical models for living cells--a review. (2006, methodology): “To model the observed rheological behavior of the adherent cells, the power-law structural damping model is proposed (Fabry et al., 2001):”
Microrheology of Complex Fluids (2011, background): “, 2001), and rotational diffusion of the beads has also been used to characterize the viscosity of the surrounding fluid and to apply mechanical stresses directly to the cell surfaces receptors using ligand coated magnetic colloidal particles deposited onto the cell membrane (Fabry et al., 2001).”
A bottom-up approach to cell mechanics (2006, background): “Unexpectedly, such studies have revealed a remarkable universality in the viscoelastic response functions of reconstituted networks and of whole cells of different types over a wide range of timescales, which is reminiscent of glassy material”
Microrheology of complex fluids (2005, methodology): “The microrheology of living cells subject to the rotational motion of ferromagnetic probes has been studied (Fabry et al 2001).”