Table 1.

Studies focusing on the mechanical effects of vimentin in the cell.

Method	Main Results	Reference
Rotational twisting cytometer	Loss of vimentin decreases cortical rigidity only at large strains	Wang & Stamenovic, 2000 [123]
Rotational twisting cytometer, active micro-rheology	VIF contribute little to cortical stiffness but doubles cytoplasmic shear modulus	Guo et al. 2013 [124]
Atomic force microscopy	Vimentin’s effect on cell stiffness only apparent for maximally-spread cells or for cells under repeated deformations	Mendez et al. 2014 [122]
Atomic force microscopy	Deletion of vimentin decreases cortical stiffness by ~10% in MDA231 breast cancer cells	Messica et al. 2017 [126]
Rotational twisting cytometer Atomic force microscopy	Loss of vimentin decreased cell stiffness as measured by sharp-tip and round-tip AFM probes; yet, loss of vimentin increased cortex stiffness reported by twisting cytometry, attributed to reduced cell thickness	Vahabikashi et al 2019 [121]
Optical tweezers	VIF increases cytoplasmic stiffness and toughness	Hu et al. 2019 [125]
Atomic force microscopy	VIF increases cell stiffness only in the perinuclear region of the cell	Patteson et al. 2019 [108]
Atomic force microscopy	Re-expression of VIF in vim −/− mEFs rescues cell stiffness	Patteson et al. 2019 [98]