Author: lpmtint

Emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) breed during the harsh Antarctic winter. During mating and breeding period (in total up to four months), the males must fast, while also incubating the egg during the latter. To survive and breed successfully, they must conserve their energy. Through evolution...

In-vitro engineered cardiac tissue grafts are of growing interest for different applications such as substituting scarred myocardial tissue after infarction or chronic cardiomyopathies, or as a drug testing platform. Several studies have recently reported successful fabrication of microtissues from s...

Automated image based tracking is widely used to investigate collective interactions in a variety of biological systems. Applied to diverse environments, ranging from cell to animal colonies, it provides insight into biological processes like cancer metastasis, immunological response, and social str...

Cell migration through a three-dimensional (3-D) matrix depends strongly on the ability of cells to generate traction forces. To overcome the steric hindrance of the matrix, cells need to generate sufficiently high traction forces but also need to distribute these forces spatially in a migration-pro...

Many cell types in our body, such as fibroblasts, immune cells but also cancer cells, are able to actively migrate and squeeze through the tiny pores and cell layers in our tissue. Similarly, blood cells are passively pushed and squeezed through narrow capillaries. In both cases, the deformability o...

Optical recordings are ubiquitous in current scientific research. As recording and storing images and videos have become simpler and cheaper over the past years, new and more efficient tools are needed to analyse the growing amount of data. While current scientific image analysis tools focus o...

Fate and function of anchorage-dependent cells depend on a variety of environmental cues, including those of mechanical nature. Previous progress in the understanding of cellular mechanosensitivity has been closely linked to the availability of artificial cell substrates of adjustable viscoelasticit...

Mechanosensation in many organs (e.g. lungs, heart, gut) is mediated by biosensors (like mechanosensitive ion channels), which convert mechanical stimuli into electrical and/or biochemical signals. To study those pathways, technical devices are needed that apply strain profiles to cells, and ideally...

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a highly aggressive malignancy with a dismal survival rate. Persistent activation of pancreatic stellate cells (PSCs) can perturb the biomechanical homoeostasis of the tumour microenvironment to favour cancer cell invasion. Here we report that ATRA, an acti...

Human cells can be easily deformed -- they stretch or become squashed under external pressure. The relationship between force and cell deformation changes in diseases such as cancer, lung disease and heart disease, as well as muscle disorders. To gain a better understanding of these diseases it is i...