Measuring biophysical properties of cells and nanoscale bioparticles in health and disease

Session

Session 5 - Super-resolution and Nanoscale Imaging

Authors

Erdinc Sezgin (1)

Affiliations

1. Karolinska Institutet

Abstract text

Remodelling of our cells as response to environmental changes is essential for their survival and function. Although numerous studies aimed at finding protein markers during such cellular processes, there is a major gap in our understanding of how collective biophysical properties of the cells (such as stiffness, membrane fluidity, viscosity etc) alter during these crucial biological processes. Similarly, our understanding of how biophysical properties of cells change in diseases is also limited. To gain a thorough mechanistic perception of cellular processes and diseases, it is essential to fill this gap and have a clear and quantitative picture of biophysical remodelling of the cells. 

Current biophysical technologies suffer from their low sampling (one cell at a time) which has been a major obstacle to apply them to medical problems that require measuring thousands of cells. This can be overcome with high throughput methodologies that can robustly report on the ensemble biophysical properties of cells which require reliable reporters and instruments. Here, I will discuss our approach from probe development to high throughput biophysical analysis.