Measurements of fast fluctuations of viscoelastic properties with the quartz crystal microbalance

Abstract

The quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) was used to study the variability of acoustic properties of living cells on the sub-second time scale. A confluent cell layer of rat cardiac myocytes was grown onto the electrode of quartz crystal resonator. The cell layer performed periodic, synchronous contractions at a rate of about 1.5 Hz. In order to monitor these rather fast changes in the state of the cells, the QCM was operated in a "fast mode", which allows sampling of the shift of the resonance frequency and energy dissipation with a rate of up to 100 Hz. The contractions were clearly reflected in periodic variations of the resonance frequency and the bandwidth. The rate of the contractions, in particular, could be easily detected in this way. Building on the rate of contraction, the setup can be used to monitor the response of the cell layer to heart stimulating drugs like isoproterenol. Depending on the concentration of isoproterenol, the beat rate was found to increase by up to a factor of two.

A survey of the 2001 to 2005 quartz crystal microbalance biosensor literature: applications of acoustic physics to the analysis of biomolecular interactions

“…Others have performed similar experiments with a confluent layer of rat cardiomyocytes (Pax et al, 2005). The cell layer exhibited periodic, synchronous contractions at a rate of about 1.5 Hz, which was clearly reflected in periodic variations of the resonance frequency and bandwidth, and which could be modulated by stimulating drugs such as isoproterenol.…”

QCM Technology in Biosensors

“…The advantage of this approach is that the sensor is interrogated with an external source which can be designed to be very stable and with extremely low phase and frequency noises. A similar approach has been already applied by some authors (Dress et al, 1999;Pax et al, 2005), but recently a simple relationship between the surface mass change and the corresponding sensor phase shift, for a sensor operating at its motional series resonant frequency, has been already obtained as follows ):…”

Dynamic Mechanical Response of Epithelial Cells to Epidermal Growth Factor

“…It has been used for determining the kinetics of cell attachment and spreading Nimeri et al, 1998) and for monitoring the long term growth of cells (Otto et al, 1999;Reipa et al, 2006). More recently, the QCM has been applied to characterization of cell viscoelasticity (Alessandrini et al, 2006;Galli Marxer et al, 2003;Li et al, 2008;Marx et al, 2005;Pax et al, 2005;Voinova et al, 2004). When the instrument used has the capability for monitoring the change in dissipation factor as well as frequency, the technique is termed QCM-D (QCM with dissipation monitoring).…”