Adrian Bejan: The architecture of fingers, human fingers, and toes is a design (organization) that has happened naturally because of the flow of stresses, small mechanical forces between the whole human body and the body that's being lifted or pushed.
In adults, organs and tissues generally do not change shape or size; as such there is a tightly balanced exchange of mechanical forces between the individual cells.
Vinculin binds to multiple focal adhesion and cytoskeletal proteins and has been implicated in transmitting mechanical forces between the actin cytoskeleton and integrins or cadherins.
They provide an integrin-based system for the transduction of mechanical forces between these cells and the surrounding ECM [ 72, 81].
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.03282.002 Tissues undergo continuous rearrangements that require tightly balanced exchanges of mechanical forces between individual cells through cadherin-mediated cell cell junctions.
Together with mutants of varying T4P density, our T4P toolbox will enable us to test how mechanical forces between cells affect cell sorting.
A key function of cell adhesion to the extracellular matrix (ECM) is to transduce mechanical forces between cells and their extracellular environment.
Cell stiffness is a measure of the number and the combined-bond elasticity of molecular interactions that transfer mechanical forces between the cell and the probe (e.g., a ligand-coated bead) (32, 33).
Similar to cell stiffness, it depends on the number of molecular interactions that transfer mechanical forces between the cell and the bead, i.e., between 1), the fibronectin-coated bead and the integrins; 2), the integrins and the FA proteins; and 3), the FA proteins and the cytoskeleton.
A major obstacle to answer all of these questions is that it is technically challenging to set up an experimental system with predefined mechanical forces between BCR and antigen, which shall then be linked to an assay to accurately measure BCR activation.
