News & Views |
Featured
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News & Views |
Cell jam
Collective cell migration and jamming in the bronchial epithelium helps to understand the pathophysiology underlying asthma.
- Melody A. Swartz
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News & Views |
Playful topology
The combination of topological constraints and deformability in an active system of microtubules and molecular motors leads to rich dynamic behaviour.
- Julia M. Yeomans
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News & Views |
Sharing the force
Cells can sense their environment by applying and responding to mechanical forces, yet how these forces are transmitted through the cell's cytoskeleton is largely unknown. Now, a combination of experiments and computer simulations shows how forces applied to the cell cortex are synergistically shared by motor proteins and crosslinkers.
- Andreas R. Bausch
- & Ulrich S. Schwarz
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Article |
Biophysical regulation of epigenetic state and cell reprogramming
Somatic cells can be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells biochemically through the expression of a few transcription factors. It is now shown that aligned microgrooves or nanofibres on cell-adhesive substrates can promote the reprogramming of somatic cells more efficiently through epigenetic regulation of genes related to pluripotency and the mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition. The findings suggest that the epigenetic state can be regulated by variations in cell morphology.
- Timothy L. Downing
- , Jennifer Soto
- & Song Li
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News & Views |
Moving under peer pressure
Collective cell motion in a continuous tissue is found to be guided by cooperative intercellular forces.
- Nir Gov
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News & Views |
Contracting to stiffness
Atomic force microscopy experiments on individual blood platelets reveal their dynamic contractile response to varied stiffness of the substrate.
- Allen Ehrlicher
- & John H. Hartwig
Encoding phase transitions
Resolution power
Fretted diffusion