Fig. 5: Statistical analysis and corresponding force curve estimation by parameterizing Young’s modulus for each cell type.

Pseudo-Elastic (Young’s) modulus distribution (a) and examples illustrating the fit quality for the Pseudo-Elastic model (b) for the adherent human skin cell lines visualized in Fig. 3. This plot provides some insight regarding the overall stiffness for each cell type, specifically that the melanoma cells appear softer than their healthy counterparts by a noticeable margin. The red markers indicate “outlier” values, which are determined to be more than 1.5 times the interquartile range away from the upper and lower bounds of the boxes. The Fibroblasts showcase the only outliers by this definition, which can be reasonably expected because significantly more curves were acquired for that cell line. The number of cells analyzed per cell type is n = 12 melanocytes, n = 13 melanoma cells, and n = 33 fibroblasts. Data are represented as mean ± deviation with significant difference between cell types determined by unpaired two-tailed Student’s t-test with Welch’s correction indicated as, *P < 0.05. Note that the sparse markers for the model estimations included in (b) are deliberately periodically spaced for representation purposes to differentiate the model estimation from the dataset—there are an equivalent number of model and AFM observable datapoints. The standard error for each cell type is provided in Supplementary Table 2.