Steric repulsion that exists around biological cells is important for the cell protection against various pathogens. As we recently demonstrated, this type of interaction can substantially be changed when cells become cancerous. Furthermore, the correlation between such repulsion and invasiveness of cancer cells is a plausible expectation. Therefore, it is important to extract the information about the steric repulsion in an accurate and quantitative manner. This is not a trivial task because the steric repulsion can be confused with the elastic deformation of the cell body. Here we describe the method that allows extracting the quantitative information about the steric repulsion. The method is presented for different AFM probes as well as cell shapes. We exemplify the above method with human cervical and cancerous breast epithelial cells.

Study of steric repulsion around human epithelial cells with atomic force microscopy

244th National Meeting (2012)

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