Acoustic waves can monitor stiffness of living cells

MIT engineers have devised a new, noninvasive way to measure the stiffness of living cells using acoustic waves. “Noninvasive monitoring of single-cell mechanical properties could be useful for studying many different types of cellular processes,” says Scott Manalis, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the MIT departments of Biological Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the senior author of the study. Over the past couple of years, Manalis and his students realized that the vibration of the cantilever also creates an acoustic wave that can be used to measure the stiffness of the particle or cell flowing through the device.

Source: news.mit.edu