Active Micro-Rheology
Active Micro-Rheology
The optical tweezers platform SENSOCELL™ allows performing active & passive micro-rheology experiments in viscoelastic media like cell’s cytoplasm, hydrogels or biofilms.:
- Use our automatized and customizable built-in routines for active and passive micro-rheology assays.
- Trap native structures such as organelles or vesicles or inject microbeads to perform rheology assays inside cells.
- Obtain rheological information of the extracellular matrix or soft gels.
Would you like to try SENSOCELL™ with your biological system samples? Let’s do it, contact us!
Active & passive micro-rheology of soft hydrogels.
New application note and videos coming soon! Meanwhile, contact us for more information.
Active & passive micro-rheology of water:glycerol mixtures.
The active & passive micro-rheology routine in our SENSOCELL™ optical tweezers system allows measuring the viscosity of liquids. In this experiment, we have added 3-micron latex beads to different water:glycerol mixtures (0%, 20%, 40%, 60% and 80% glycerol in water). For each single experiment, a bead was trapped using our optical tweezers and forced to oscillate sinusoidally with 200 nm amplitude at increasing frequencies (3Hz to 100 Hz). The calculated viscosity values were then obtained by fitting the frequency dependence of the measured loss modulus (G”). Figure 1 shows an example of measured loss moduli at increasing frequencies for a 40% glycerol mixture.
Fig.1 Example of measured loss moduli at increasing frequencies for a 40% glycerol mixture.
Figure 2 shows the predicted versus measured viscosity values of the different mixtures (increasing viscosity values correspond to increasing glycerol percentages). Symbols indicate mean of 9 different beads probed, error bars indicate S.D.
Fig.2 Predicted versus measured viscosity values of the different mixtures.
