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. 2019 Sep 16;9:13286. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-49592-1

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© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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The viscoelasticity of single cells can be measured using flow rates of 600 and 1000 μl/min. (a) 2.8-μm particles conjugated with integrin are bound to the surface of the cells. A cell-bound particle is displaced when the flow is on and moves to towards its initial position when the flow is off, exhibiting typical viscoelasticity. The original images were inverted so that the particle appears to be bright and the background dark, for the purpose of better visualization. White arrow indicates flow direction. Scale bar: 20 μm. (b) The particle displacement is plotted against time. (c,d) The typical viscoelastic behavior over time of the cell subjected to deforming forces can be observed in the plot. The Kelvin-Voigt 4 element model used to fit the displacement data consists of two spring elements and two dashpot elements representing the effective elastic modulus and the effective viscosity. (e) The viscoelastic parameters, including elastic moduli, E₀ and E₁, viscosity µ₁, and relaxation time τ, were evaluated by fitting the particle displacement under the flow rates of 600 µl/min (n = 53) and 1000 µl/min (n = 80). The values obtained from the two flow rates are comparable with no statistically significant differences. Bar (−): p > 0.05, n.s.: not significant.