Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : Dynamics and Design Conference 2016
Date : August 23, 2016 - August 26, 2016
It is known that living bodies consist of many cells and that each cell senses environmental changes as mechanical stimuli. In most researches related to a cell mechanosensing system, static stimuli are applied as mechanical stimuli in experiments. On the other hand, it was reported that osteoblasts also responded to mechanical vibration as dynamical stimuli. In this reaction, biochemical response of cells has maximum value under mechanical vibration of a certain frequency. This phenomenon has analogy with resonance phenomena in the vibration engineering field. Therefore, we considered that cells have natural frequencies and modes of vibration because cytoskeletons have stiffness and that deforming cellular structures under mechanical vibration is in relation to cell mechanosensors. Here we show a novel method to observe a living cell under mechanical vibration. We focused on nuclei and actin filaments as cellular structures and investigated the existence of modes of vibration of a cell by fluorescently labelling and visualizing it. Mechanical vibration was applied to living cells by an exciter. Videos were taken by a high speed and high sensitive camera. The phase difference between the movement of a cell and an exciter was measured to find natural frequencies.
