Cell biology articles within Nature Materials

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  • Article |

    Microtubules respond to mechanical compression by deforming, becoming more stable, which results in CLASP2 recruitment to the distorted shaft—a process crucial for cell migration through confined spaces.

    • Yuhui Li
    • , Ondřej Kučera
    •  & Manuel Théry

  • News & Views |

    Locally confined epithelial malignancies undergo a phase transition from a solid-like to liquid-like state, a process called unjamming, where associated chronic intracellular strain causes nuclear envelope rupture, leading to the emergence of pro-metastatic traits due to cGAS–STING pathway activation.

    • Matthew Deyell
    •  & Samuel F. Bakhoum

  • Article |

    Viscoelasticity is a universal mechanical feature of the extracellular matrix. Here the authors show that the extracellular matrix viscoelasticity guides tissue growth and symmetry breaking, a fundamental process in morphogenesis and oncogenesis.

    • Alberto Elosegui-Artola
    • , Anupam Gupta
    •  & David J. Mooney

  • News & Views |

    By maximizing cell–substrate force transmission, cancer cells can migrate towards either stiffer or softer substrate regions.

    • Amy E. M. Beedle
    •  & Pere Roca-Cusachs

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Collective cell migration in embryonic tissues is triggered by cell softening due to a microtubule deacetylation pathway involving the mechanosensitive ion channel Piezo1.

    • Cristian L. Marchant
    • , Abdul N. Malmi-Kakkada
    •  & Elias H. Barriga

  • Article |

    Directed cell movement known as durotaxis, typically associated with cellular migration in response to a substrate gradient of increasing stiffness, is now shown to also occur in the opposite direction, following a gradient of decreasing stiffness.

    • Aleksi Isomursu
    • , Keun-Young Park
    •  & David J. Odde

  • News & Views |

    Integrin-mediated substrate-rigidity sensing triggers microtubule acetylation, modulating mechanosensitive cellular responses and focal adhesion dynamics, subsequently promoting actomyosin organization and collective cell migration.

    • Kseniia Porshneva
    •  & Guillaume Montagnac

  • Article |

    Substrate-rigidity-dependent microtubule acetylation is now shown to be triggered by mechanosensing at focal adhesions, and in turn controls the mechanosensitivity of Yes-associated protein (YAP) translocation, focal adhesion distribution, actomyosin contractility and cell migration.

    • Shailaja Seetharaman
    • , Benoit Vianay
    •  & Sandrine Etienne-Manneville

  • Article |

    The role of actin/tropomyosin filaments in the assembly of cell–substrate adhesions has been investigated and it is now shown by cryo-electron tomography that they are essential for adhesion assembly and also regulate mechanosensing, matrix remodelling and transformation of cells towards a cancer phenotype.

    • Maria Lastra Cagigas
    • , Nicole S. Bryce
    •  & Edna C. Hardeman

  • News & Views |

    Stress fibres form a fully integrated meshwork with the submembranous contractile actin cortex that generates and propagates traction forces across the entire cell.

    • Guillaume Charras

  • News & Views |

    Automated extrusion-based bioprinting has been shown to enable human kidney organoid generation with improved throughput, quality control and scale, representing an important step towards macro-scale kidney tissue engineering.

    • Benjamin D. Humphreys

  • Article |

    The mechanism of stress fibre assembly by the coalescence of actin filaments in the cell cortex has now been found to account for the transmission of mechanical forces throughout the entire cell along stress fibres.

    • Timothée Vignaud
    • , Calina Copos
    •  & Laetitia Kurzawa

  • News & Views |

    Functional single-cell liver hemi-canaliculi have been generated in a synthetic microenvironment using a reductionist approach. It is shown that the interaction between the extracellular matrix and static cadherin is sufficient to develop an apicobasal polarity independently of the contact with neighbouring cells.

    • Covadonga Díaz-Díaz
    •  & Fernando Martín-Belmonte

  • News & Views |

    While integrin-based adhesions are thought to underlie many aspects of cell response to localized tension, another matrix receptor, syndecan-4, has now been shown to act as a mechanosensor, which triggers cell-wide integrin activation and adhesion reinforcement.

    • Christophe Guilluy
    •  & Monika E. Dolega

  • News & Views |

    Mutations in lamins in skeletal muscle cells have been shown to reduce nuclear stability, increase nuclear envelope rupture, and induce DNA damage and cell death. New research shows that limiting mechanical loads can rescue myofibre function and viability.

    • Joel C. Eissenberg
    •  & Susana Gonzalo

  • Article |

    Receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK)–Ras oncogenes have now been shown to reprogram normal primary human and mouse cells into tumour precursors by empowering cellular mechanotransduction, in a process requiring permissive extracellular-matrix rigidity and intracellular YAP/TAZ/Rac mechanical signalling sustained by activated oncogenes.

    • Tito Panciera
    • , Anna Citron
    •  & Stefano Piccolo

  • News & Views |

    Cancer cells have now been shown to lack rigidity-sensing due to alteration in cytoskeletal sensor proteins, but can be reversed from a transformed to a rigidity-dependent growth state by the sensor proteins, resulting in restoration of contractility and adhesion.

    • Edna C. Hardeman
    •  & Peter W. Gunning

  • Article |

    A mechanism of cell response to localized tension shows that syndecan-4 synergizes with EGFR to elicit a mechanosignalling cascade that leads to adaptive cell stiffening through PI3K/kindlin-2 mediated integrin activation.

    • Antonios Chronopoulos
    • , Stephen D. Thorpe
    •  & Armando E. del Río Hernández

  • Article |

    Lamin mutations responsible for muscular dystrophy are shown to reduce nuclear envelope stability, resulting in mechanically induced nuclear envelope rupture, DNA damage and activation of DNA damage response pathways that lead to muscle cell death. Preventing nuclear envelope damage by reducing cytoskeletal forces on the nucleus improves muscle fibre health and function.

    • Ashley J. Earle
    • , Tyler J. Kirby
    •  & Jan Lammerding

  • Article |

    Anticancer drugs such as Taxol can affect microtubule dynamics and organization in cells. Direct visualization of the action of such drugs has shown that they can trigger local and cooperative changes in microtubule lattice and induce formation of stable microtubule regions that promote rescues.

    • Ankit Rai
    • , Tianyang Liu
    •  & Anna Akhmanova

  • News & Views |

    Nanofibre mimetic substrates reveal the presence of integrin nanoclusters bridged by unliganded receptors during early cell–matrix adhesion.

    • E. Ada Cavalcanti-Adam

  • Article |

    A range of cancer cell types are shown to lack rigidity-sensing due to alteration in specific cytoskeletal sensor proteins and this sensing ability can be reversed from a transformed to a rigidity-dependent growth state by the sensor proteins, resulting in restoration of contractility and adhesion.

    • Bo Yang
    • , Haguy Wolfenson
    •  & Michael P. Sheetz

  • News & Views |

    A molecular pathway has been identified in the regulation of unjamming to overcome cancer cell migration and proliferation arrest leading to collective cell invasion.

    • René Marc Mège

  • Article |

    Integrin-mediated adhesions required for cell spreading and growth have now been shown, using super-resolution microscopy, to form on fibrous matrices through the dense assembly of integrins in nanoclusters that contain both ligand-bound and unliganded integrins.

    • Rishita Changede
    • , Haogang Cai
    •  & Michael P. Sheetz

  • News & Views |

    With their ability to give rise to many different cell types, stem cells have long been a target of scientists who seek to achieve control over their differentiation. New evidence suggests that stem cells influence their own fates through protein deposition and physical remodelling of their microenvironment.

    • Eric L. Qiao
    • , Sanjay Kumar
    •  & David V. Schaffer

  • Article |

    A RAB5A-mediated, epidermal growth factor-dependent activation of endosomal ERK1/2 is identified as a key molecular route for a solid-to-liquid-like phase transition, sufficient to overcome kinetic and proliferation arrest in normal mammary epithelial assemblies and to promote collective invasion in breast carcinoma.

    • Andrea Palamidessi
    • , Chiara Malinverno
    •  & Giorgio Scita

  • News & Views |

    An intermediate affinity state of integrin αIIBβ3 has been identified to be a key player in platelet mechanosignalling.

    • X. Frank Zhang
    •  & Xuanhong Cheng

  • News & Views |

    Macrophage confinement reduces the ‘late’ inflammatory gene response to lipopolysaccharide through myocardin-related transcription factor, an actin-binding transcription factor.

    • Wendy F. Liu

  • News & Views |

    Single-cell force spectroscopy reveals rapid, biphasic integrin activation and reinforcement of cell–matrix bonds during the initial steps of fibroblast adhesion.

    • Ning Wang

  • Editorial |

    As the role of biophysical cues in regulating cell behaviour is increasingly understood, more evidence in the field of bioengineering indicates how such signals can affect cells and tissues.

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