Measurement of Mechanical Properties of Intact Endothelial Cells in Fresh Arteries

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) has been successfully applied not only to the topography of biological specimens but also to the measurement of their local mechanical properties. This technique is very useful for imaging such biological specimens as cells, proteins, and DNA, because no special treatments of samples are required (1 ,2 ). The measurement of local mechanical properties in a living cell is achieved with a nanoindentation technique (3 ). The method has been applied to several kinds of cultured cells, including Madin-Darby canine kidney (MDCK) cells (4 ), myocytes (5 ), fibroblasts (6 ,7 ), and endothelial cells (8 ,9 ). However, morphology and properties are different between cells cultured in vitro on substrate and intact cells in vivo (10 ).