Integrated automated nanomanipulation and real-time cellular surface imaging for mechanical properties characterization

Surface microscopy of individual biological cells is essential for determining the patterns of cell migration to study the tumor formation or metastasis. This paper presents a correlated and effective theoretical and experimental technique to automatically address the biophysical and mechanical properties and acquire live images of biological cells which are of interest in studying cancer. In the theoretical part, a distributed-parameters model as the comprehensive representation of the microcantilever is presented along with a model of the contact force as a function of the indentation depth and mechanical properties of the biological sample. Analysis of the transfer function of the whole system in the frequency domain is carried out to characterize the stiffness and damping coefficients of the sample. In the experimental section, unlike the conventional atomic force microscope techniques basically using the laser for determining the deflection of microcantilever's tip, a piezoresistive microcantilever serving as a force sensor is implemented to produce the appropriate voltage and measure the deflection of the microcantilever. A micromanipulator robotic system is integrated with the MATLAB (R) and programmed in such a way to automatically control the microcantilever mounted on the tip of the micromanipulator to achieve the topography of biological samples including the human corneal cells. For this purpose, the human primary corneal fibroblasts are extracted and adhered on a sterilized culture dish and prepared to attain their topographical image. The proposed methodology herein allows an approach to obtain 2D quality images of cells being comparatively cost effective and extendable to obtain 3D images of individual cells. The characterized mechanical properties of the human corneal cell are furthermore established by comparing and validating the phase shift of the theoretical and experimental results of the frequency response. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4757115]