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Quantifying forces in cell biology

Nature Cell Biology volume 19, pages 742–751 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Cells exert, sense, and respond to physical forces through an astounding diversity of mechanisms. Here we review recently developed tools to quantify the forces generated by cells. We first review technologies based on sensors of known or assumed mechanical properties, and discuss their applicability and limitations. We then proceed to draw an analogy between these human-made sensors and force sensing in the cell. As mechanics is increasingly revealed to play a fundamental role in cell function we envisage that tools to quantify physical forces may soon become widely applied in life-sciences laboratories.

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Figure 1: Force quantification techniques for cell biology.

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Acknowledgements

We apologize to the many colleagues whose work could not be cited owing to space constraints. We thank M. Arroyo, J. C. del Álamo, J. J. Muñoz, G. W. Brodland, and all members of our laboratories for critical comments and encouragement. The authors acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness through the Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa Award to the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia, and through grants BFU2015-65074-P to X.T., BFU2014-52586-REDT and BFU2016-79916-P to P.R.-C., and BFU2016-75101-P and RYC-2014-15559 to V.C. The authors also acknowledge support from the Generalitat de Catalunya (Cerca Program and 2014-SGR-927 to X.T.), the European Research Council (CoG-616480 to X.T.), the European Commission (project 731957 to P.R.-C. and X.T.) and Fundació la Marató de TV3 (project 20133330 to P.R.-C.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona, 08028, Spain

    Pere Roca-Cusachs, Vito Conte & Xavier Trepat

  2. University of Barcelona, Barcelona, 08028, Spain

    Pere Roca-Cusachs & Xavier Trepat

  3. Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, 08010, Spain

    Xavier Trepat

  4. Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red en Bioingeniería, Biomateriales y Nanomedicina, Barcelona, 08028, Spain

    Pere Roca-Cusachs & Xavier Trepat

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  1. Pere Roca-Cusachs
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Correspondence to Pere Roca-Cusachs, Vito Conte or Xavier Trepat.

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Roca-Cusachs, P., Conte, V. & Trepat, X. Quantifying forces in cell biology. Nat Cell Biol 19, 742–751 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb3564

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