Mechanical properties have shown to be important for fundamental cellular processes like migration and differentiation, as well as in the characterization and understanding of cancer. Although colloidal probes are commercially available, it is still common practice to glue beads on the cantilever. This is a precision job and can only be done one bead at a time. Coating has to be applied with the glued bead on the cantilever. Not so with the Flex-FPM system...
With FluidFM, gluing of beads is circumvented conveniently: pre-coated beads are mounted to the hollow cantilever shortly before the experiment by the application of underpressure. Upon contamination, a bead can be immediately exchanged and measurements can continue with the same cantilever.
A comparison between colloidal spectrosocpy with FluidFM and glued bead is available as pdf.
The proof of principle of FluidFM colloidal spectroscopy has been demonstrated in Biophysical journal in 2013.
In 2016 an example has been published using colloidal particles prepared from polyanionic and polycationic recombinant spider silk proteins in the journal of physical chemistry C.
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