University of California, Davis

Establishing the “structure–mechanical property–function” paradigm at the single cell level is of critical importance in understanding individual and collective behaviors such as wound healing, tissue engineering, and cancer diagnosis and therapy.  Current advances have revealed a strong correlation within the paradigm.  This project will develop a simple and reliable method to enable exploration of the paradigm systematically and quantitatively.  Based on combined atomic force and laser scanning confocal microscopy, the new method develops specifically modified probes and accurate mechanical positioning to conduct high-resolution imaging and cellular mechanics of living cells in vitro.  The micro-mechanical measurements will be acquired at length and time scales relevant to cell function, and processed with custom written code to quantify mechanics such as Young’s moduli.  This approach will first be used to uncover the sub-cellular mechanism associated with the inflammatory responses of human aortic endothelial cells and lung macrophages following exposure to manufactured nanomaterials.  The outcome shall demonstrate that assessment of health risk is complex and multimodal, and that this paradigm at the single cell level provides a complementary and possibly more sensitive means for risk assessment.  Upon development, this technology will be made available in the W. M. Keck Spectral Imaging Facility to all researchers.