National Research Council of Italy

2 ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN JoVE

Bioengineering

Measurement of Tension Release During Laser Induced Axon Lesion to Evaluate Axonal Adhesion to the Substrate at Piconewton and Millisecond Resolution

Massimo Vassalli¹, Michele Basso², Francesco Difato³

¹Institute of Biophysics, National Research Council of Italy, ²Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica, Università di Firenze, ³Department of Neuroscience and Brain Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

We measured the tension release in an axon that was partially lesioned with a laser dissector by simultaneous force spectroscopy measurement performed on an optically-trapped probe adhered to the membrane of the axon. The developed experimental protocol evaluates the axon adhesion to the culture substrate.

Bioengineering

Experimental and Data Analysis Workflow for Soft Matter Nanoindentation

Giuseppe Ciccone¹, Mariana Azevedo Gonzalez Oliva¹, Nelda Antonovaite², Ines Lüchtefeld³, Manuel Salmeron-Sanchez¹, Massimo Vassalli¹

¹Centre for the Cellular Microenvironment, James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, ²Optics 11 life, ³Laboratory of Biosensors and Bioelectronics, ETH Zürich

The protocol presents a complete workflow for soft material nanoindentation experiments, including hydrogels and cells. First, the experimental steps to acquire force spectroscopy data are detailed; then, the analysis of such data is detailed through a newly developed open-source Python software, which is free to download from GitHub.