Abstract
It was reported that osteoblastic cells responded to mechanical vibration and generated the bone mass with a peak at a specific frequency like a resonance curve. This phenomena seems to have an analogy to the resonance of a cell as a mechanical system. This paper describes a novel method to measure modes of vibration of a cell and its calcium ion response under vibration. The obtained results were evaluated to clarify the mechanism of the cell mechanosensing. A nucleus on which we focused in a cell and intracellular calcium ion were visualized with fluorescent labelling. Vibration was applied in the horizontal direction. We used a high speed and high sensitive camera to measure nucleus deformation and a confocal laser microscope system to measure the ion concentration change depending on required capturing speed and sensitivity. As a result, although we did not observe the modes of vibration of a nucleus, we found that the intracellular calcium ion concentration began to increase after applying vibration. This result indicates that applying vibration to a cell produce calcium signals as a second messenger by causing the entry of the ion.
