The surface nanostructure features of ovarian cancer cells by atomic force microscopy

Ovarian cancer is a disease with a high mortality rate in women. The important reasons for high mortality rate of ovarian cancer is the difficulty in early detection. The process of cell carcinogenesis is often accompanied by changes in surface nanostructure of cell membrane. In this study, atomic force microscopy (AFM) was used to obtain the nanostructure features of ovarian cancer cells. IOSE-80 (human ovarian normal cells) and Caov3 (human ovarian cancer cells) cell lines were selected and the morphology of the cell nuclear regions were measured using AFM Quantitative Imaging (QI) mode, which can offer information of hight, adhesion and slope channels. The surface parameters of the cell obtained from the three channels were analyzed. The results showed that there were significant statistical differences in parameters Root-mean- square height (Sq), Skewness (Ssk), Maximum height (Sz) and Arithemetic mean height (Sa) of adhesion channel, Sq, Ssk and Sa of hight channel. These findings indicate that the three channel in AFM imaging can offer different information of the surface nanostructure and the combination of these feature parameters may improve the identification accuracy of cancer. Our study will provide a new idea for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer based on the nanostructure features of cell surface at the single-cell level.