This project will determine if adhesive interactions can be used to predict and isolate potentially beneficial or deleterious nanostructures for specific biological activity. It would be the first attempt to directly measure interaction forces between living cells and engineered nanostructures. This new cellular probe force microscopy (CPFM) technique will attach tissue culture to a probe that can assess large regions in a single experiment. Preliminary results show that the CPFM technique is sensitive to directly probe cell receptor-ligand binding. The project work plan was well presented with good justifications for each of the main experimental components. These justifications for experimental simplicity do eliminate more environmentally relevant research, however, the aim of the project is to demonstrate the feasibility of the tool which can then be applied to many different fields.
