Cellular Stiffness and Deformability

Cell mechanics, which explores the mechanical properties and behaviors of cells, is intimately related to cell biology and is crucial for understanding various disease processes and developing new therapeutic approaches. Microfluidic technology, offering precise manipulation of individual cells in a controlled microenvironment, has shown great potential for measuring cell deformability and stiffness in biophysical analyses. Combining this technology with optics, high-speed microscopy, and artificial intelligence has paved the way for advancing our understanding of cancer biology, immunology, and infectious diseases, leading to the emergence of a new field known as “morphlomics”. This field offers new-generation label-free approaches for cellular biophysics. This chapter provides an overview of this field, deepening readers’ understanding of how physical properties like size, deformability, deformation kinetics, and morphology correlate with the physical characteristics of cells in different states. It highlights the potential for exploring cellular mechanical properties to conduct comprehensive multimodal cell analysis.