The use of water tension sensors removes the need for substrate specific calibration and enables a more direct relationship with hydraulic conductivity.
Also, cable tensions acquired via tension sensors confirm that cables always remain taut during all experimental verifications at feasible frequencies and that they are consistent with the tension variations predicted by theory.
In this article, we highlight advances in the development of molecular force sensing techniques and discuss our recently expanded set of FRET-based tension sensors that allows the analysis of mechanical forces with piconewton sensitivity in cells.
Finally, other approaches to determine forces in cells could be combined with FRET-based tension sensors.
In summary, properly characterized molecular tension sensors provide a powerful tool to gain insight into cellular mechanotransduction.
Tension sensors are fundamental for the low-level control of the grasping force (Cipriani et al. 2006).
Interestingly, when bearing forces, actin filaments can survive from being severed by cofilin and function as tension sensors [ 145].
Tension sensors are integrated in the cable transmission to monitor the force applied by actuators in order to emulate the function of biological Golgi tendon organs.
Experimental trials with able-bodied subjects demonstrated high reliability and robustness of such a simple control algorithm (Cipriani et al. 2006) that exploits a minimum set of sensors including encoders, intrinsic-force sensors, and cable-tension sensors.
It is important to note that molecular tension sensors are unsuitable to measure forces across subcellular structures in general (in fact, this is precisely what they do not do), but specifically report tension across the POI.
34 These examples illustrate that the true power of FRET-based tension sensors lies not only in the force measurement itself but also in the possibility to unravel molecular mechanisms that are currently inaccessible to other techniques.
