Abstract
Adhesive interactions of soft materials play an important role in nature and technology. Interaction energies can be quantified by determining contact areas of deformable microparticles with the help of reflection interference contrast microscopy (RICM). For high throughput screening of adhesive interactions, a method to automatically evaluate large amounts of interacting microparticles was developed. An image is taken which contains circular interference patterns with visual characteristics that depend on the probe’s shape due to its surface interaction. We propose to automatically detect radial profiles in images, and to measure the contact radius and size of the spherical probe, allowing the determination of particle-surface interaction energy in a simple and fast imaging and image analysis setup. To achieve this, we analyze the image gradient and we perform template matching that utilizes the physical foundations of reflection interference contrast microscopy.
Highlights
Adhesive interactions between deformable materials play an important role in technology as well as in biological processes, e.g. when cells interact with surfaces
The method is based on determining the mechanical deformation of the SCP particles on a planar substrate by means of reflection interference contrast microscopy (RICM, see Fig 1)
We use a pre-processing step to accelerate the calculation and we apply Pearson correlation to Radial profile detection of spherical particles compare the templates with the microscope image
Summary
Adhesive interactions between deformable materials play an important role in technology as well as in biological processes, e.g. when cells interact with surfaces. In order to shed light on the underlying principles, adhesion phenomena need to be precisely quantified. Direct quantification of adhesion by means of a surface force apparatus or atomic force microscopy has provided valuable insights into the field of mechanobiology, bioadhesives and colloid science, to name just a few. While offering precise quantitative information on adhesive interactions down to the molecular level, these force-based techniques require considerable experimental effort. The method is based on determining the mechanical deformation of the SCP particles on a planar substrate by means of reflection interference contrast microscopy (RICM, see Fig 1). RICM as an imaging technique has long been successfully used to study the adhesion phenomena of cells, vesicles, and hard colloidal particles [4], since the underlying contacts can be visualized with nanometer-precision in the vertical direction using an optical
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