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Improved Measurement of Elastic Properties of Cells by Micropipette Aspiration and Its Application to Lymphocytes

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Abstract

Mechanical deformability of cells is an important property for their function and development, as well as a useful marker of cell state. The classical technique of micropipette aspiration allows single-cell studies and we provide here a method to measure the two basic mechanical parameters, elastic modulus and Poisson’s ratio. The proposed method, developed from finite-element analysis of micropipette aspiration experiments, may be implemented in future technologies for the automated measurement of mechanical properties of cells, based on the micropipette aspiration technique or on the cell transit through flow constrictions. We applied this method to measure the elastic parameters of lymphocytes, in which the mechanical properties depend on their activation state. Additionally, we discuss in this work the accuracy of previous models to estimate the elastic modulus of cells, in particular the analytical model by Theret et al., widely used in the field. We show the necessity of using an improved model, taking into account the finite size of the cells, to obtain new insights that may remain hidden otherwise.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank M. Carmen Álvarez for her help in preparing microscopy samples. Blanca González-Bermúdez received a research grant from the Consejería de Educación, Juventud y Deporte de la Comunidad de Madrid. The authors received support from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain, througth the project MAT2016-76847-R.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Biomedical Technology. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28223, Pozuelo de Alarcón, Spain

    Gustavo Esteban-Manzanares, Blanca González-Bermúdez, Qingxuan Li, Gustavo V. Guinea, José Pérez-Rigueiro, Manuel Elices & Gustavo R. Plaza

  2. Departamento de Ciencia de Materiales, ETSI de Caminos, Canales y Puertos, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Gustavo Esteban-Manzanares, Blanca González-Bermúdez, Qingxuan Li, Gustavo V. Guinea, José Pérez-Rigueiro, Manuel Elices & Gustavo R. Plaza

  3. Departamento de Fisiología Animal II, Facultad de Biología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Julia Cruces & Mónica De la Fuente

  4. Institute for Biomedical Engineering & Nano Science, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, People’s Republic of China

    Gustavo R. Plaza

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  1. Gustavo Esteban-Manzanares
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  2. Blanca González-Bermúdez
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Correspondence to Gustavo R. Plaza.

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Associate Editor Konstantinos Konstantopoulos oversaw the review of this article.

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Esteban-Manzanares, G., González-Bermúdez, B., Cruces, J. et al. Improved Measurement of Elastic Properties of Cells by Micropipette Aspiration and Its Application to Lymphocytes. Ann Biomed Eng 45, 1375–1385 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-017-1795-7

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