Cells in the lungs, the heart, and numerous other organs, are constantly exposed to dynamic forces and deformations. To mimic these dynamic mechanical loading conditions and to study the resulting cellular responses such as morphological changes or the activation of biochemical signaling pathways, c... 

Heike Lappert, secretary of the Biophysics group, wins the 2020 Erlangen cycling contest in the category “individual ranking”. She cycled 1026 km in 3 weeks. Congratulations! 

Natural killer (NK) cells are important effector cells in the immune response to cancer. Clinical trials on adoptively transferred NK cells in patients with solid tumors, however, have thus far been unsuccessful. As NK cells need to pass stringent safety evaluation tests before clinical use, the cel... 

Camera traps for motion-triggered or continuous time-lapse recordings are readily available on the market. For demanding applications in ecology and environmental sciences, however, commercial systems often lack flexibility to freely adjust recording time intervals, suffer from mechanical component w... 

Magnetic tweezers based on a solenoid with an iron alloy core are widely used to apply large forces (∼100 nN) onto micron-sized (∼5 μm) superparamagnetic particles for mechanical manipulation or microrheological measurements at the cellular and molecular level. The precision of magnetic tweezers, ho... 

To reach the female gametophyte, growing pollen tubes must penetrate different tissues within the pistil, the femalereproductive organ of a flower. Past research has identified various chemotropic cues that guide pollen tubes through thetransmitting tract of the pistil, which represents the longest ... 

We describe a method for quantifying the contractile forces that tumor spheroids collectively exert on highly nonlinear three-dimensional collagen networks. While three-dimensional traction force microscopy for single cells in a nonlinear matrix is computationally complex due to the variable cell sh... 

We describe a technique for simultaneous quantification of the contractile forces and cytosolic calcium dynamics of muscle fibers embedded in three-dimensional biopolymer gels. We derive a scaling law for linear elastic matrices such as basement membrane extract hydrogels (Matrigel) that allows us t...