Speaker
Description
Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) are unique, heterogeneous lipid bilayer-based nanoparticles secreted by cells. Their subpopulations differ in size, charge, biogenesis and vesicle lamellarity. As potential class of cell-free diagnostic and therapeutic vehicles, their physical chemical characterization, in particular their mechanical properties, are an issue of recent investigations [1,2]. As nanometric objects, AFM presents itself as a striking technique for their characterization, which has previously been done using imaging modes[3] or force spectroscopy modes — from using simple parameters such as linear stiffness to the more standardized Young's modulus to evaluate elasticity, thin-shell theory or an ad hoc model elaborated by Roos & Wuite's groups based on a modification of Calham-Helfrich theory[2]. In the latter, the authors elegantly describe a method to estimate stiffness, osmotic pressure and bending modulus of the vesicle [4].
Here, we adapt an automation procedure developed in-house in a sequential multi-sample fashion operating in fluids applied to prokaryotic cells [5] by which we can map automatically each vesicle, raising the throughput of vesicle measurements to hundreds per preparation, and analyze by comparing the different existing mechanical models. As a proof of concept, we are using synthetic vesicles.
References
[1] D. Vorselen et al., Nat Commun 2018, 9, 4960.
[2] M. LeClaire at al., Nano Select 2021, 2, 1.
[3] Y. Kikuchi et al., Nanoscale 2020, 12, 7950.
[4] D. Vorselen et al., Front. Mol. Biosci. 2020, 7.
[5] A. Dujardin et al., PLOS ONE 2019, 14, e0213853.
| Session | Molecular interactions at the membrane surface |
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