Related papers: Measuring cellular traction forces on non-planar s…
The measurement of cellular traction forces on soft elastic substrates has become a standard tool for many labs working on mechanobiology. Here we review the basic principles and different variants of this approach. In general, the…
Traction force microscopy is a method widely used in biophysics and cell biology to determine forces that biological cells apply to their environment. In the experiment, the cells adhere to a soft elastic substrate, which is then deformed…
We introduce a novel three-dimensional (3D) traction force microscopy (TFM) method motivated by the recent discovery that cells adhering on plane surfaces exert both in-plane and out-of-plane traction stresses. We measure the 3D deformation…
Adherent cells exert traction forces on to their environment, which allows them to migrate, to maintain tissue integrity, and to form complex multicellular structures. This traction can be measured in a perturbation-free manner with…
Traction Force Microscopy (TFM) computes the forces exerted at the surface of an elastic material by measuring induced deformations in volume. It is used to determine the pattern of the adhesion forces exerted by cells or by cellular…
A living cell actively generates traction forces on its environment with its actin cytoskeleton. These forces deform the cell elastic substrate which, in turn, affects the traction forces exerted by the cell and can consequently modify the…
Traction Force Microscopy (TFM) is a technique used to determine the tensions that a biological cell conveys to the underlying surface. Typically, TFM requires culturing cells on gels with fluorescent beads, followed by bead displacement…
Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
Combining experiments with artificial intelligence algorithms, we propose a new machine learning based approach to extract the cellular force distributions from the microscope images. The full process can be divided into three steps. First,…
Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…
The tractions that cells exert on a gel substrate from the observed displacements is an increasingly attractive and valuable information in biomedical experiments. The computation of these tractions requires in general the solution of an…
Contraction assay based on surface measurement have been widely used to evaluate cell contractility in 3D models. This method is straightforward and requires no specific equipment, but it does not provide quantitative data about contraction…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…
Adherent biological cells generate traction forces on a substrate that play a central role for migration, mechanosensing, differentiation, and collective behavior. The established method for quantifying this cell-substrate interaction is…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
Mechanobiology is gaining more and more traction as the fundamental role of physical forces in biological function becomes clearer. Forces at the microscale are often measured indirectly using inverse problems such as Traction Force…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
The mechanosensitivity of cells, which determines how they are able to respond to mechanical signals received from their environment, is crucial for the functioning of all biological systems. In experiments, cells placed on cyclically…
Describing and measuring the elastic properties of cellular materials such as honeycombs and foams can be a difficult problem when the cell structure is disordered. This paper suggests that tracking the flow of forces through the material…