Comparison between power-law rheological parameters of living cells in frequency and time domains measured by atomic force microscopy

Abstract

We investigated how stress relaxation mapping is quantified compared with the force modulation mapping of confluent epithelial cells using atomic force microscopy (AFM). Using a multi-frequency AFM technique, we estimated the power-law rheological behaviors of cells simultaneously in time and frequency domains. When the power-law exponent α was low (<0.1), the α values were almost the same in time and frequency domains. On the other hand, we found that at the high values (α > 0.1), α in the time domain was underestimated relative to that in the frequency domain, and the difference increased with α, whereas the cell modulus was overestimated in the time domain. These results indicate that power-law rheological parameters estimated by stress relaxation are sensitive to lag time during initial indentation, which is inevitable in time-domain AFM experiments.