Traditional techniques for fabricating polyacrylamide (PA) gels containing fluorescent probes involve sandwiching a gel between an adherent surface and a glass slide. Here, we show that coating this slide with poly-D-lysine (PDL) and fluorescent probes localizes the probes to within 1.6 µm from the gel surface.
Knoll, S. G., Ali, M. Y., Saif, M. T. A. A Novel Method for Localizing Reporter Fluorescent Beads Near the Cell Culture Surface for Traction Force Microscopy. J. Vis. Exp. (91), e51873, doi:10.3791/51873 (2014).