Nanorheology reveals intra- and inter-cellular heterogeneity in cytoplasm viscosity

Abstract

The cytoplasm is a complex, crowded, actively-driven environment whose biophysical characteristics are known to modulate cellular processes such as cytoskeletal dynamics, phase separation, and stem-cell fate. While it is well-established that cells maintain certain physical properties, much less is known about cellular control over the variance in these characteristics within and between cells. We employed high-speed particle-tracking nano-rheology on genetically-encoded multimeric nanoparticles (GEMs) expressed in S.