Fractal properties of biophysical models of pericellular brushes can be used to differentiate between cancerous and normal cervical epithelial cells

Publication date: 1 October 2018Source: Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces, Volume 170Author(s): Juan de Dios Hernández Velázquez, Sergio Mejía-Rosales, Armando Gama GoicocheaAbstractFractal behavior is found on the topographies of pericellular brushes on the surfaces of model healthy and cancerous cells, using dissipative particle dynamics models and simulations. The influence of brush composition, chain stiffness and solvent quality on the fractal dimension is studied in detail. Since fractal dimension alone cannot guarantee that the brushes possess fractal properties, their lacunarity was obtained also, which is a measure of the space filling capability of fractal objects. Soft polydisperse brushes are found to have larger fractal dimension than soft monodisperse ones, under poor solvent conditions, in agreement with recent experiments on dried cancerous and healthy human cervical epithelial cells. Additionally, we find that image resolution is critical for the accurate assessment of differences between images from different cells. The images of the brushes on healthy model cells are found to be more textured than those of brushes on model cancerous cells, as indicated by the larger lacunarity of the former. These findings are helpful to distinguish monofractal behavior from multifractality, which has been found to be useful to discriminate between immortal, cancerous and normal cells in recent experiments.Graphical abstract
Source: Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces - Category: Biochemistry Source Type: research