Biophysical Society 66th Annual Meeting Program Guide

Exhibits 10:00 am - 5:00 pm, Exhibit Hall ABC

Coffee Break 10:15 am - 11:00 am, Exhibit Hall ABC Exhibitor Presentation Axiom Optics 10:30 am - 12:00 pm, Esplanade, Room 158

F R I D A Y

S U N D A Y

Meet the Editors, Biophysical Journal 10:15 am - 11:00 am, South Lobby/Publications Booth Take this opportunity to meet editors of Biophysical Journal . Editors will be available to talk about the journal and answer questions about where you should submit your work, what will help to get your work published, and what you can expect when you submit. Editor-in-Chief Vasanthi Jayaraman and Editors Heiko Heerklotz, Sudha Chakrapani, and others will attend.

SENSOCELL: Optical Tweezers Integrating Direct Force Spectroscopy & Correlated Fluorescence Imaging For Extra- and Intra-Cellular Mechano- biology Optical tweezers (OT) were first applied to biology research questions in the early 90s, and since then they have been primarily used for molecular biology applications. Conversely, their use in cell biology research has been greatly limited to trapping experiments intended for moving or manipulating living cells. The sparsity of quantitative experiments using OT in living cells is mainly due to the difficulties in measuring readily and accurately the forces applied by OT onto the probed samples. Here we present our distinctive OT platform SENSOCELL for Mechano - biology research, which allows users to carry out direct force measure - ments in vitro, in vivo or in situ. Molecules and cells can be manipulated and probed using microspheres as handles in in vitro conditions. Alter - natively, forces can be directly applied and measured on cells (trapping cells as a whole) or inside cells, either via exogenous spherical particles or directly trapping endogenous cellular structures such as lipid vesicles, the cell membrane, the cell nucleus or other organelles. Thanks to its unique direct force sensor based on the analysis of light momentum changes, measurement protocols with SENSOCELL are unhindered by recurrent trap stiffness calibrations, allowing experiments to be carried out in an easy and speedy manner by non-expert users. The flexibility offered by SENSOCELL for controlling multiple traps (up to 256) with simultaneous force measurements increases throughput and allows advanced protocols for extra- and intra-cellular mechanics. The control software includes built-in routines that allow performing active micro-rheology measurements, clamping forces for particle tracking and creep tests or designing stress-relaxation experiments. The platform is integrated on customizable scientific inverted microscopes and can be combined with fluorescence imaging techniques such as Confocal, Spin -

ning Disk, epi-FL or TIRF. Key applications include: •

Active micro-rheology in cells and scaffolds Cell nucleus stretching and indentation Measurement of membrane tension

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Membrane tether pulling

Microtubules and motor proteins activity

Cell-cell interactions Cell-particle interactions

Microswimmer force dynamics In our presentation, we will shortly introduce the key distinctive features of our technology and show examples and results obtained by our cus - tomers and scientific collaborators for the aforementioned applications in living cells. Speaker Oriol Nos, CEO, IMPETUX

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