Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, CSIC, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 3, 28049 Madrid, Spain ; Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Cuba, Carretera de San Antonio de los Baños, km 1 ½, Valle Grande, La Habana, Cuba.
The Henryk Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Radzikowskiego 152, 31-342 Kraków, Poland.
Beilstein J Nanotechnol. 2014 Apr 10;5:447-57. doi: 10.3762/bjnano.5.52. eCollection 2014.
Various studies have demonstrated that alterations in the deformability of cancerous cells are strongly linked to the actin cytoskeleton. By using atomic force microscopy (AFM), it is possible to determine such changes in a quantitative way in order to distinguish cancerous from non-malignant cells. In the work presented here, the elastic properties of human bladder cells were determined by means of AFM. The measurements show that non-malignant bladder HCV29 cells are stiffer (higher Young's modulus) than cancerous cells (HTB-9, HT1376, and T24 cell lines). However, independently of the histological grade of the studied bladder cancer cells, all cancerous cells possess a similar level of the deformability of about a few kilopascals, significantly lower than non-malignant cells. This underlines the diagnostic character of stiffness that can be used as a biomarker of bladder cancer. Similar stiffness levels, observed for cancerous cells, cannot be fully explained by the organization of the actin cytoskeleton since it is different in all malignant cells. Our results underline that it is neither the spatial organization of the actin filaments nor the presence of stress fibers, but the overall density and their 3D-organization in a probing volume play the dominant role in controlling the elastic response of the cancerous cell to an external force.
多种研究表明，癌细胞变形能力的改变与肌动蛋白细胞骨架密切相关。通过原子力显微镜（AFM），可以定量地确定这些变化，以便将癌细胞与非恶性细胞区分开来。在本工作中，通过 AFM 测定了人膀胱细胞的弹性特性。测量结果表明，非恶性膀胱 HCV29 细胞比癌细胞（HTB-9、HT1376 和 T24 细胞系）更硬（杨氏模量更高）。然而，无论所研究的膀胱癌细胞的组织学分级如何，所有癌细胞的变形能力都相似，约为几个千帕斯卡，明显低于非恶性细胞。这强调了刚度的诊断特征，可作为膀胱癌的生物标志物。对于癌细胞，观察到的类似刚度水平不能完全用肌动蛋白细胞骨架的组织来解释，因为它在所有恶性细胞中都是不同的。我们的结果表明，控制癌细胞对外部力的弹性响应的主要因素不是肌动蛋白丝的空间组织，也不是应力纤维的存在，而是探测体积中整体密度及其 3D 组织。
