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. 2021 Jul 29;11:15477. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-94735-y

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© The Author(s) 2021

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 licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence 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 licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Analysis of the effect of the stiffness of the CTC and platelets on the adhesion and arrest of CTCs. A CTC with 5 attached platelets floating in the blood flow was investigated. (a) Softer CTCs adhere faster to the vessel wall than stiffer CTCs. A CTC by 30% softer (red line) leads to 50% decrease in the adhesion time while a 30% stiffer CTC causes a 50% increase in the adhesion time. Faster adhesion of softer CTCs is mainly because of the expanded contact area between CTC and the vessel that leads to a higher number of adhesion bonds between the CTC with attached platelets and the endothelial cells; (b) Softer CTCs travel shorter distances before firm adhesion occurs, mainly because they adhere faster than normal tumor cells; (c) The adhesion time of the CTC with attached platelets that are 30% softer or stiffer than the baseline platelets, does not have a significant effect on the adhesion time and the CTCs in all the three cases form the firm adhesion at the same time; (d) Softer platelets (by 30%) can decrease the rolling distance of the CTC by 8% but 30% stiffer platelets do not cause any remarkable difference on the rolling distance of the CTC compared to the baseline platelets. Altogether, the stiffness of the CTC is a more determining factor in the adhesion and arrest of the CTC than the stiffness of the attached platelets.