Neonatal rat ventricular myocytes force mapping using double-sided micropillar arrays

This paper reports measuring contractility of neonatal rat ventricular myocytes (NRVM) using a novel cell force sensor, namely, a double-sided micropillar array (DMA) developed for both single cell force measurements using conventional microscopy as well as high-throughput cell force mapping based on the optical moiré effect. The contraction force map of NRVM cultured on DMA was acquired with nanonewton and submicron scale resolution using confocal microscopy. For the moiré-based method, the local average of the cell contraction force was derived from the moiré pattern, which allows mapping cell contraction force using a 20X objective lens, enabling the acquisition of a larger field-of-view than conventional microscopy.