Abstract:
The rheological properties of cells and tissues are central to embryonic development and homeostasis in adult tissues and organs and are
closely related to their physiological activities. This work presents our study of rheological experiments on cell monolayer under serum
starvation compared to healthy cell monolayer with full serum. Serum starvation is one of the most widely used procedures in cell biology.
However, the effect of deprivation of serum concentration on the material properties of cells is still unknown. Therefore, we performed
macro-rheology experiments to investigate the effect of serum starvation on a fully confluent Madin–Darby Canine Kidney cell monolayer.
The material properties, such as linear and non-linear viscoelastic moduli, of the monolayer, were measured using oscillatory shear experiments under serum-free [0% fetal bovine serum (FBS)] and full serum (10% FBS) conditions. Our results indicate that a serum-starved cell
monolayer shows a different rheological behavior than a healthy cell monolayer. The loss and storage moduli decrease for the step-change in
oscillatory strain amplitude experiments for a serum-starved cell monolayer and do not recover fully even after small deformation. In comparison, a healthy cell monolayer under full serum condition remains flexible and can fully recover even from a large deformation at higher
strain. The effect of adhesion due to fibronectin was also studied in this work, and we found a significant difference in slip behavior for cell
monolayer with and without serum.
