Seminar at Salón de Actos. ICMM.
Abstract: Living cells sense and exchange biological, chemical, and mechanical information, as well as nutrients, water and waste products with their surroundings. These processes involve changes of a cell’s volume and mass and are tightly linked to fundamental processes such as metabolism, proliferation, gene expression and cell death. Yet it remains challenging to characterise the dynamics and regulation of a cell’s mass and volume in real time and with high accuracy, hampering our understanding of cell physiology. Moreover, dysregulation of cell mass is a critical underlying force in the development and progression of many disorders such as cancer, diabetes type 2, obesity, cardiovascular disease and ageing. Therefore understanding how cells regulate their mass has enormous potential to transform the way we diagnose, monitor and treat disease.
I will introduce a new technology (picobalance) that we have developed, which is based on an optomechanical microresonator. It measures the mass of single or multiple cells in culture conditions over days at millisecond time resolution reaching subpicogram mass sensitivity. Besides, this technology allows measuring cells’ rheological properties. I will present some of the results we have discovered using this technology in both mammalian cells and yeast, and which challenge models in biology that have been central for decades.
