Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - 2:00 PM
Room 5 (McKimmon Conference Center)
497

Axisymmetric Drop Shape Analysis for Estimating the Surface Tension of Cell Aggregates by Centrifugation

Ali Kalantarian, Sameh M. I. Saad, Hiromasa Ninomiya, Rudolf Winklbauer, and A. Wilhelm Neumann. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Biological tissues behave in certain respects like liquids. As a consequence of this behavior, the surface tension concept should be applicable. The concept of tissue surface tension can be used to explain aspects of the in vitro and in vivo behavior of multicellular aggregates. Unfortunately, conventional methods of surface tension measurement can not be readily used for tissue surface tension measurement. Drop shape techniques such as Axisymmetric Drop Shape Analysis (ADSA) are not readily applicable because interfacial tension overpowers gravity for fairly small cell aggregates. This difficulty can be removed by centrifugation, here by a procedure at 100g. Since the aggregates typically show roughness, ADSA can not be applied to aggregates deformed at 100g. A novel numerical method to measure the surface tension of cell aggregates is proposed in the framework of ADSA. Thus, a drop shape method inside the ADSA framework has to start with one of the components of ADSA, called Axisymmetric Liquid Fluid Interfaces (ALFI). ALFI predicts the theoretical Laplacian drop shape, here for the situation of 100g. The optimization, i.e., the fitting between theoretical and experimental drop shape, used here is also quite different from that used in ADSA, on account of the roughness of the cluster surfaces, superimposed on the Laplacian shape. To examine this new methodology, embryonic tissues from the frog, Xenopus laevis, deformed in the centrifuge at 100g were used. As an illustration, the average of surface tension for the mesenchymal cells for a sample batch was measured as 3.8 mJ/m2, and the surface tension of the mesenchymal cells coated with epithelium was measured as 1.3 mJ/m2. The numerical results were compared with literature values. Compared to other methods used in the literature, the proposed method in conjunction with centrifugation is, experimentally, comparatively straightforward.