Squeeze Me Tight

Here's the moment a skin cancer cell grabs a tiny gel ball packed with fluorescent nanoparticles, squeezing it tightly with a membrane ‘hand’. This microscopic game of catch has been set up to measure the physical forces generated by cells growing in plastic dishes in the lab as they jostle for space against each other. It’s a major technical challenge: single cells don’t generate forces and will quickly die on their own, but cells grown together in a dish are so tightly packed that it’s hard to measure their might. By throwing these bouncy fluorescent blobs at single cells, researchers can measure how tightly a cell squeezes by seeing how hard it squishes the ball, based on the movement of the fluorescent particles inside. Knowing more about the physical properties of individual cancer cells provides useful insights as to how they might behave as a tumour grows and spreads.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image courtesy of Ning Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China
• Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
• Image copyright held by the original author
• Research published in Nature Communications, May 2018