Changes in Mechanical Properties of Endothelial Cells with Age Contribute to Impairment of Nuclear Shear Stress Mechanosensing (Jacques Ohayon, Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc)

Mechanobiology, the study of cellular mechanical properties (MPs) and how they transduce physical stimuli into a biological response, is an active area of current research due to the implications in several disease processes1. Previous reports have shown that the MPs of senescent cells and those in an accelerated aging disease, Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome2,3, are altered significantly. However the granularity at which this information was collected needs refinement: there appear to be several different studies reporting composite stiffnesses as measured by atomic force microscopy (AFM) to be higher2-4, lower5, and unchanged6 between young and aged cells. Current biomechanical measurements as taken by AFM require several assumptions about the geometry and material to be made7 which do not hold true for senescent cells. Namely – senescent cells grow to be exceedingly large8. Here, we use a correlative super-resolution/AFM approach to perform measurements on individual cells to extract ....