Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Físico - Matemáticas (CICFIM), Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Nuevo León 66450, Mexico.
División de Ingeniería Química y Bioquímica, Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Ecatepec, Estado de México 55210, Mexico.
Colloids Surf B Biointerfaces. 2018 Oct 1;170:572-577. doi: 10.1016/j.colsurfb.2018.06.059. Epub 2018 Jun 28.
Fractal behavior is found on the topographies of pericellular brushes on the surfaces of model healthy and cancerous cells, using dissipative particle dynamics models and simulations. The influence of brush composition, chain stiffness and solvent quality on the fractal dimension is studied in detail. Since fractal dimension alone cannot guarantee that the brushes possess fractal properties, their lacunarity was obtained also, which is a measure of the space filling capability of fractal objects. Soft polydisperse brushes are found to have larger fractal dimension than soft monodisperse ones, under poor solvent conditions, in agreement with recent experiments on dried cancerous and healthy human cervical epithelial cells. Additionally, we find that image resolution is critical for the accurate assessment of differences between images from different cells. The images of the brushes on healthy model cells are found to be more textured than those of brushes on model cancerous cells, as indicated by the larger lacunarity of the former. These findings are helpful to distinguish monofractal behavior from multifractality, which has been found to be useful to discriminate between immortal, cancerous and normal cells in recent experiments.
使用耗散粒子动力学模型和模拟，在模型健康细胞和癌细胞表面的细胞周围刷状结构的形貌上发现了分形行为。详细研究了刷状结构组成、链刚性和溶剂质量对分形维数的影响。由于分形维数本身并不能保证刷子具有分形特性，因此还获得了它们的空隙度，这是分形物体空间填充能力的度量。在不良溶剂条件下，与最近对干燥的癌症和健康人宫颈上皮细胞的实验结果一致，软多分散刷子比软单分散刷子具有更大的分形维数。此外，我们发现图像分辨率对于准确评估来自不同细胞的图像之间的差异至关重要。健康模型细胞上的刷子图像比模型癌细胞上的刷子图像纹理更多，这表明前者的空隙度更大。这些发现有助于区分单分形行为和多分形行为，最近的实验发现这对于区分永生、癌变和正常细胞很有用。
