PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Marie Kijima
AU  - Hiroyuki Yamagishi
AU  - Riho Kawano
AU  - Tomoki Konishi
AU  - Takuya Okumura
AU  - Masanori Hayase
AU  - Ryushin Mizuta
TI  - Linker histone H1 determines cell stiffness and differentiation
AID  - 10.1101/2020.01.21.914770
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.01.21.914770
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/23/2020.01.21.914770.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/23/2020.01.21.914770.full
AB  - The flexibility or stiffness, one mechanical property of cells, is a promising label-free biomarker for underlying cytoskeletal or nuclear changes associated with various disease processes and changes in cell state. However, the molecular changes responsible for the whole-cell mechanical stiffness remain to be clarified. Recently, it was shown that the deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) microfluidic device, originally developed for size fractionation of some particles, might be applied to distinguish cells according to their stiffness. In this experiment, using the DLD device and various cell lines differentially expressing histone H1, a positively-charged protein localized in the linker region of chromatin, we found linear relationships between histone H1 quantity and cell stiffness. We also found that the histone H1 quantity affected cell size and even cell differentiation.