Introduction Tissues can be soft like brain, bone marrow, and fat, which bear little mechanical
stress, or stiff like muscle, cartilage, and bone, which sustain high levels of stress. …

Cell migration through solid tissue often involves large contortions of the nucleus, but biological
significance is largely unclear. The nucleoskeletal protein lamin-A varies both within and …

Tissue microenvironments are characterized not only in terms of chemical composition but
also by collective properties such as stiffness, which influences the contractility of a cell, its …

On rigid surfaces, the cytoskeleton of migrating cells is polarized, but tissue matrix is normally
soft. We show that nonmuscle MIIB (myosin-IIB) is unpolarized in cells on soft matrix in 2D …

Self-renewal and differentiation of stem cells depend on asymmetric division and polarized
motility processes that in other cell types are modulated by nonmuscle myosin-II (MII) forces …

Scarring is a long-lasting problem in higher animals, and reductionist approaches could aid
in developing treatments. Here, we show that copolymerization of collagen I with …

G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the largest and most diverse group of membrane
receptors in eukaryotes and detect a wide array of cues in the human body. Here we …

Materials-based control of stem cell fate is beginning to be rigorously combined with
traditional soluble-factor approaches to better understand the cells' behaviour and maximize …

Early in embryogenesis, the heart begins its rhythmic contractions as a tube that helps perfuse
the nascent vasculature, but the embryonic heart soon changes shape and mechanical …

Mechanotransduction pathways convert forces that stress and strain structures within cells
into gene expression levels that impact development, homeostasis, and disease. The levels of …