相关论文: Soft matter mechanics of immune cell aggregates
Adhesion between a T cell and an antigen presenting cell is achieved by TCR-pMHC and LFA1-ICAM1 protein complexes. These segregate to form a special pattern, known as the immunological synapse (IS), consisting of a central quasi-circular…
Spherical cellular aggregates are in vitro systems to study the physical and biophysical properties of tissues. We present a novel approach to characterize the mechanical properties of cellular aggregates using micropipette aspiration…
Cells are known to exert forces to sense their physical surroundings for guidance of motion and fate decisions. Here, we propose that cells might do mechanical work to drive their own evolution, taking inspiration from the adaptive immune…
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…
One of the most unique physical features of cell adhesion to external surfaces is the active generation of mechanical force at the cell-material interface. This includes pulling forces generated by contractile polymer bundles and networks,…
Cells can sense forces applied to them, but also the stiffness of their environment. These are two different phenomena, and here we investigate the mechanosensitivity of the IInd kind: how the cell can measure an elastic modulus at a single…
Collective cell migration plays a central role in tissue development, morphogenesis, wound repair and cancer progression. With the growing realization that physical forces mediate cell motility in development and physiology, a key…
Immune cells learn about their antigenic targets using tactile sense: during recognition, a highly organized yet dynamic motif, named immunological synapse, forms between immune cells and antigen-presenting cells (APCs). Via synapses,…
Immune cells recognize and discriminate antigens through immunological synapses - dynamic intercellular junctions exhibiting highly organized receptor-ligand patterns. While much work has focused on molecular kinetics and passive mechanisms…
The cytoskeleton protein actin assembles into large bundles when supporting stresses in the cell, but grows into a fine branched network to induce cell motion. Such self-organization processes are studied in artificial networks of…
T cells are central to the adaptive immune response, capable of detecting pathogenic antigens while ignoring healthy tissues with remarkable specificity and sensitivity. Quantitatively understanding how T cell receptors (TCRs) discriminate…
Aggregation is a common behavior by which groups of organisms arrange into cohesive groups. Whether suspended in the air (like honey bee clusters), built on the ground (such as army ant bridges), or immersed in water (such as sludge worm…
To insight the relationships between the self-organizing structures of cells, such as the cell clusters, and the properties of biotissues is helpful in revealing the function and designing biomaterial. Traditional random foam model neglects…
Protein aggregation in cell membrane is vital for the majority of biological functions. Recent experimental results suggest that transmembrane domains of proteins such as $\alpha$-helices and $\beta$-sheets have different structural…
We investigate a special part of the human immune system, namely the activation of T-Cells, using stochastic tools, especially sharp large deviation results. T-Cells have to distinguish reliably between foreign and self peptides which are…
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.…
The vertebrate immune system is a wonder of modern evolution. Occasionally, however, correlations within the immune system lead to inappropriate recruitment of preexisting T cells against novel viral diseases. We present a random energy…
Mechanical coupling between a cell and substrate relies on focal adhesions, clusters of adhesion proteins linking stress fibers (bundles of actin proteins) inside the cell with surrounding tissue. Focal adhesions have been demonstrated to…
Adhesion-dependent cells actively sense the mechanical properties of their environment through mechanotransductory processes at focal adhesions, which are integrin-based contacts connecting the extracellular matrix to the cytoskeleton. Here…
The immunological synapse is a patterned collection of different types of receptors and ligands that forms in the intercellular junction between T Cells and antigen presenting cells (APCs) during recognition. The synapse is implicated in…