Contactless micro-elastography of single cells using oscillating microbubbles as shear wave sources
Abstract
The mechanical properties of cells play key roles in their physiology, function, physiological and pathological transformations. Micro-elastography has recently emerged as a promising tool to estimate cellular viscoelastic properties within a millisecond, without the need for mechanical modeling. Here, we report a fully contactless approach to single-cell micro-elastography, using acoustically oscillating gas microbubbles positioned near individual cells (20~\textmu m diameter megakaryocytes) as localized shear wave sources. Using this approach, we successfully performed micro-elastography on cells up to five times smaller than those studied in previous works, establishing the smallest single-cell elastography measurements to date. Spherical or non-spherical bubble oscillations generated 15~kHz elastic waves, which we detected using a high-speed camera coupled to a standard bright-field microscope. Noise correlation elastography enabled the measurement of average and local shear-wave velocities within single cells. Our results demonstrate that this method is robust and reproducible across multiple cells from the same cell line, paving the way for real-time, label-free mechanical monitoring of single cells during fast biological processes.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.18294,
title = {Contactless micro-elastography of single cells using oscillating microbubbles as shear wave sources},
author = {Gabrielle Laloy-Borgna and Maxime Fauconnier and Sibylle Grégoire and Stefan Catheline and Claude Inserra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.18294},
year = {2025}
}