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

• Published in: Colloids and surfaces, B, Biointerfaces B, Biointerfaces, 2018-10, Vol.170, p.572-577
• Main Authors: Hernández Velázquez, Juan de Dios, Mejía-Rosales, Sergio, Gama Goicochea, Armando
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cancer cells; Dissipative particle dynamics; Fractal dimension; Lacunarity; Pericellular brushes; Polymer brushes
• ISSN: 0927-7765; 1873-4367
• DOI: 10.1016/j.colsurfb.2018.06.059

[Display omitted] •Models for brushes on surface of cancer, normal cells show fractal dimension is larger in cancer cells.•The quality of the solvent and stiffness of the brushes affect the fractal dimension.•Image resolution is crucial for accurate calculation of fractal dimension.•Lacunarity of normal cells is larger than that of cancer cells.•Our predictions confirm and help explain recent experiments. Fractal 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.