Quantitative Mapping of Local Mechanical Properties of Living Cells at Near-Physiological Conditions Using Multi-Harmonic Atomic Force Microscopy

Measurements of local nanomechanical properties of living cells recently have become extremely important for the cellular biology and biomechanics communities [1]. The measurement of progressive variations in viscoelastic properties of living cells in their native physiological liquid environments can provide significant insight to the mechanistic processes underpinning morphogenesis, mechano-transduction, motility, metastasis, aging, etc. Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) based biomechanical assays have the unique advantage of resolving/mapping spatially the local nanomechanical properties over the cell surface. However current methods using standard force-volume, force displacement curves [2–3] are very low resolution and low speed making them completely incompatible for biomechanical assays of living cells.