Mechanical properties measured by atomic force microscopy define...

Genetic and environmental factors are key drivers regulating organismal lifespan but how these impact healthspan is less well understood. Techniques capturing biomechanical properties of tissues on a nano-scale level are providing new insights into disease mechanisms.*

In the article “ Mechanical properties measured by atomic force microscopy define health biomarkers in ageing C. Elegans “ Clara L. Essmann, Daniel Martinez-Martinez, Rosina Pryor, Kit-Yi Leung, Kalaivani Bala Krishnan, Prudence Pokway Lui, Nicholas D.E. Greene, André E.X. Brown, Vijay M. Pawar, Mandayam A. Srinivasan and Filipe Cabreiro apply Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) to quantitatively measure the change in biomechanical properties associated with ageing Caenorhabditis elegans in addition to capturing high-resolution topographical images of cuticle senescence.*

The authors show that distinct dietary restriction regimes and genetic pathways that increase lifespan lead to radically different healthspan outcomes. Hence, their data support the view that prolonged lifespan does not always coincide with extended healthspan. Importantly, they identify the insulin signalling pathway in C. elegans and interventions altering bacterial physiology as increasing both lifespan and healthspan.*

Overall, AFM provides a highly sensitive technique to measure organismal biomechanical fitness and delivers an approach to screen for health-improving conditions, an essential step towards healthy ageing.*

The topographical images shown in this article were acquired using NANOSENSORS™ uniqprobe qp-CONT AFM probes. These AFM probes have very soft cantilevers designed for imaging of biological samples ( k = 0.1 N/m ).

Figure 1 f) from” Mechanical properties measured by atomic force microscopy define health biomarkersin ageing C. Elegans “ by Clara L. Essmann et al, please follow this external link for the full figure: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14785-0/figures/1
f Representative AFM cuticle topography images of ageing C. elegans at different ages.

*Clara L. Essmann, Daniel Martinez-Martinez, Rosina Pryor, Kit-Yi Leung, Kalaivani Bala Krishnan, Prudence Pokway Lui, Nicholas D.E. Greene, André E.X. Brown, Vijay M. Pawar, Mandayam A. Srinivasan, Filipe Cabreiro
Mechanical properties measured by atomic force microscopy define health biomarkers in ageing C. Elegans
Nature Communications (2020) 11:1043
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14785

Please follow this external link to read the full article: https://rdcu.be/b3zb L

Open Access: The article “Mechanical properties measured by atomic force microscopy define health biomarkersin ageing C. Elegans” by Clara L. Essmann, Daniel Martinez-Martinez, Rosina Pryor, Kit-Yi Leung, Kalaivani Bala Krishnan, Prudence Pokway Lui, Nicholas D.E. Greene, André E.X. Brown, Vijay M. Pawar, Mandayam A. Srinivasan, Filipe Cabreiro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.