Abstract

Cell mechanics plays a very important role in various cellular functions and in many disease-related mutations, especially for carcinogenesis [1], and has been extensively studied in the last years thanks to the rapid development of lab-on-chip technologies. In particular, it was proved that cell's mechanical properties can be used as an intrinsic and reliable marker of cells’ conditions [2,3]. Cells’ cytoskeleton has a complex and dynamic structure which constantly and continuously changes according to cell status and also to external environment stimuli and temperature. Here we show how the cell temperature deeply impact the cytoskeleton mechanical properties using two optofluidic microchips: the first is a traditional optical stretcher, exploiting optical forces to induce cell deformation; while, the second one (shown in Fig.1) is substantially constituted by an optical single-cell sorter with an additional constriction embedded along the output branch, and is used to test cell’s capability to pass through a small constriction in a passive way [4]. To explore the temperature impact on cell mechanics, we equipped the two systems with an additional temperature control system, which allows keeping the chip, the cells, and the solutions at a controlled temperature. The properties of investigated cell line (highly metastatic human melanoma cells - A375MC2) were studied at four different temperatures: 5°C, 15°C, 25°C and 35°C.

© 2015 IEEE