Mechanical Evolution of Metastatic Cancer Cells in 3D Microenvironment.

ABSTRACT: Cellular biomechanics plays a critical role in cancer metastasis and tumor progression. Existing studies on cancer cell biomechanics are mostly conducted in flat 2D conditions, where cells' behavior can differ considerably from those in 3D physiological environments. Despite great advances in developing 3D in vitro models, probing cellular elasticity in 3D conditions remains a major challenge for existing technologies. In this work, optical Brillouin microscopy is utilized to longitudinally acquire mechanical images of growing cancerous spheroids over the period of 8 days. The dense mechanical mapping from Brillouin microscopy enables us to extract spatially resolved and temporally evolving mechanical features that were previously inaccessible. Using an established machine learning algorit

SUBMITTER: Hilai K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12051740 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature