Journal of Biotechnology & Biomaterials
Open Access

Review Article

High Frequency Scanning Acoustic Microscopy as Diagnostic Tool in Tissue Science

Faculty of Acoustic Program, Pennsylvania State University, USA

Corresponding Author:

Tittmann BR
Faculty of Acoustic Program
Pennsylvania State University, USA
Tel: (814) 865-7827
E-mail: BRTESM@engr.psu.edu

Received date: May 15, 2013; Accepted date: June 17, 2013; Published date: June 22, 2013

Citation: Xi X, Li X, Miyasaka C, Kropf M, Tittmann BR (2013) High Frequency Scanning Acoustic Microscopy as Diagnostic Tool in Tissue Science. J Biotechnol Biomater 3:160. doi:10.4172/2155-952X.1000160

Copyright: © 2013 Xi X, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of High Frequency Scanning Acoustic Microscopy (HF SAM) as a tool to characterize biological tissues. The HF SAM is shown to provide both imaging and quantitative stiffness measuring abilities. The plant cell wall is used as a test analog to study the influence on stiffness when one important structural component is removed from a complex polymer structure. In particular, the hypothesis of this work was that the biopolymer pectin may have a strong effect on the mechanical properties of primary plant cell walls. The technical approach was to use HF SAM to document the effect of pectinase enzyme treatment to remove pectin from onion primary cell wall. The novelty in this work was to demonstrate the capability of HF SAM in terms of a characteristic curve called the V(Z) signature. The results indicate a significant change in the V(Z) signature with time into the enzyme treatment. Thus the HF SAM method opens the door to a systematically nondestructive study of complex bio-polymer structures.