Figure 1
Assessment of peritoneal rigidity by atomic force microscopy. (A) Mouse peritoneum was mounted on an atomic force microscope (AFM) and force-indentation curves were obtained using a 5 μm spherical probe mounted on a cantilever (triangle). (B) Force-maps were generated by obtaining an 8 × 8 grid of Young’s elastic modulus (E) values from 20 μm × 20 μm regions within a tissue section. (C and D) The grids were transformed into color-coded heat maps, the scales of which could be was set using minimum and maximum values from an individual map (C) or from values from a series of maps to compare results between numerous regions across several different animals (D; note that the leftmost map in (D) is the same map, shown with different value scaling, as in (C)). (E) Box and whisker plots showing minimum and maximum (lower and upper whiskers), 25th-75th quartiles (box), and median (horizontal line inside box) E values from normal mouse peritoneum (ms. peritoneum) and soft (3 kPa) or stiff (25 kPa) polyacrylamide hydrogels (0.05% or 0.5% bis-acrylamide crosslinker, respectively; n = 1724 for mouse peritoneum and n = 128 for each gel).
