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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Cells exert forces on their external environment for a variety of reasons; for example to crawl, to rearrange than deform the extracellular matrix, and to send and receive information. A longstanding goal of cell biology is to measure and quantify these very tiny forces, in situ, while perturbing the cell as little as possible. I will describe a way we have invented to solve this problem and then go on to discuss a few practical applications that combine our method with other more classical techniques to yield new insights into the mechanics and control of cell motion and into the molecular biology, physiology and pathology, of mechanosensory transduction at the cellular level.
Host: Byron Goldstein