Viscoelastic and structural properties of the cytoskeleton

Abstract

The viscoelasticity of the cell's cytoskeleton is important for various cellular processes and changes in these properties are associated with numerous diseases. Microrheology, which uses the motion of embedded particles, was used to study these properties of the extracted cytoskeleton network of 3T3 fibroblasts, alveolar epithelial cells (A549 and R3/1) and kidney fibroblasts expressing the integrins avb3 and/or a5b1. Using centroid dedrifting and offset fitting to reduce drift and the static error, video particle tracking microrheology could be used up to kHz frequencies. The obtained persistence length of filaments in the cytoskeletal network suggested that the network surrounding the tracer particles consisted mostly of intermediate filaments, which could be best described by the glassy worm-like chain model. Characterizing the response of the cytoskeletal filament network to mechanical stimuli showed that it was cell type and integrin type dependent.