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This collection of recent articles from Nature Research journals focuses on the latest efforts to understand the roles of mechanical forces in animal cells and tissues. It highlights the broad involvement of mechanical forces in different biological contexts, their roles in development, physiology and disease, and discusses how these forces are sensed and transduced to produce biologically-relevant responses. The collection also showcases new technical approaches to study and modulate mechanobiology, which in the future could be used control cell fate and behaviour for therapeutic benefits. This collection is aimed for researchers from a broad range of disciplines — biologists, physicists and theoreticians alike — and we hope that it will foster inter-disciplinary initiatives to study biological systems.
An ultrathin, needle-shaped piezoelectric microsystem that can be injected or mounted onto conventional biopsy needles measures variations in tissue modulus in real time and can thus be used to distinguish abnormal from healthy tissue.
A microtechnology involving force sensors embedded in elastomers for cell culture enables the high-throughput measurement of single-cell force generation from contractile cells in a scalable and highly parallelized manner.
Purely elastic biomimetic soft materials are used to characterize the mechanical response of cells, but do not resemble real tissues. Here the authors develop a viscoelastic solid hydrogel, based on polyacrylamide, that can be tuned to closely resemble soft tissue, and show the influence of viscous dissipation on cellular mechanical sensing.
Molecular force microscopy employs a combination of fluorescence polarization microscopy and molecular tension sensors to determine the orientation of cellular forces. The technology is demonstrated for integrin-mediated forces in platelets and fibroblasts.
Angiogenesis has been implicated in fibrotic diseases of the liver. Here, the authors developed microniches that mimic angiogenesis during different stages of liver fibrosis, and demonstrate the role of mechanotransduction in fibrogenesis.
A genetically encoded tension sensor module for measuring molecular forces at 3–5 pN along with tools for multiplexed tension sensing and data analysis reveal an intramolecular tension gradient across talin-1 during cell adhesion.
Nanoscale vibrations provided by a bioreactor induce the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells into mineralized tissue in three dimensions, independently of other environmental factors.
This protocol describes how to exert precise spatial and mechanical control over genetically encoded cell-surface receptors in live cells using magnetoplasmonic nanoparticles.
Mechanical forces can trigger a variety of biological responses in cells and tissues. This protocol describes how to combine 3D magnetic twisting cytometry with confocal fluorescence microscopy to study these force responses in greater detail.
Kronenberg et al. develop a system to record cell–substrate interactions allowing the measurement of horizontal and vertical forces at high resolution, and demonstrate its use by monitoring podosome protrusion and other cell behaviours.
Many cellular processes rely on cells generating or responding to nanoscale mechanical forces. This protocol describes STED–traction force microscopy (STFM), which allows these forces to be measured with higher resolution and accuracy than standard TFM.
Cellular mechanical forces are regulated by Rho GTPases. Here the authors develop an optogenetic system to control the spatiotemporal activity of RhoA, and show that directing a RhoA activator to the plasma membrane causes contraction and YAP nuclear localization, whereas directing it to the mitochondria causes relaxation.