Measurement of interaction force between RGD-peptide and Hela cell surface by optical tweezers

Since RGD peptides (R: arginine; G: glycine; D: aspartic acid) are found to promote cell adhesion, they are modified at numerous materials surface for medical applications such as drug delivery and regenerative medicine. Peptide-cell surface interactions play a key role in the above applications. In this letter, we study the adhesion force between the RGD-coated bead and Hela cell surface by optical tweezes. The adhesion is dominated by the binding of α5β1 and RGD-peptide with higher adhesion probability and stronger adhesion strength compared with the adhesion of bare bead and cell surface. The binding force for a single α5β1-GRGDSP pair is determined to be 16.8 pN at a loading rate of 1.5 nN/s. The unstressed off-rate is 1.65 × 10-2 s-1 and the distance of transition state for the rigid binding model is 3.0 nm.