MEchanics GAthering –MEGA- Seminar: Mechanics and biology: exploring the internal dialogue of cells and tissues

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Event details

Date 16.03.2023
Hour 16:1517:30
Speaker Adrien Méry (MICROBS, EPFL)
Location Online
Category Conferences - Seminars
Event Language English
Abstract:
Living systems are never mechanically at rest : cells are constantly moving and contracting, the blood flow and respiration deform different organs and tissues, and different movements are performed at the body scale. These deformations are perceived by the cells through mechanotransduction. They thus act as signals, involved in the regulation of numerous biological processes such as morphogenesis, homeostasis and wound healing. Thanks to the extracellular matrix, an arrangement of different chemicals and fibers on which the cells rest, these deformations can propagate over long distances. In return, cells respond to these mechanical stimuli: they move, adapt their phenotype or contractility, and secrete and modify the arrangement of the extracellular matrix. Mechanobiology set to task to study the interactions between biological processes and the mechanics associated to them. To this end, biophysicists need to characterize and track the evolution of the mechanical properties of the systems they study. Various tools can be utilized to measure these properties depending on the scale of the model considered. At the scale of the tissue, these measurements are required to understand how these signals are emitted, propagated and perceived between cells. We developed a method to utilize cells as actuators of their own tissues thanks to optogenetics, allowing us to estimate the elasticity and viscosity of the tissues. At the scale of cells, mechanical behavior will impact how cells would interact with one another, which is critical in the immune system proper function for instance. To study the mechanics of cells directly, deformability cytometry can be used to achieve a high throughput. Overall, understanding better how mechanics govern cells and tissue behavior would allow us to apply this knowledge to synthetic morphogenesis. Once the rules that regulate the shape of tissues will be properly understood, it would be possible to play with them and take control of the shaping of the tissues. These advances would in turn allow progress in regenerative medicine and biorobotics.

Biography:
Adrien obtained his master's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Grenoble INP - Phelma in 2018. He completed his PhD in Physics for Life Sciences at Université Grenoble Alpes in 2022 where he utilized optogenetics to measure the mechanical properties of tissues. He was recruited as a post-doctoral scientist in MICROBS with Prof. Sakar to study how mechanics can be used for tissue synthetic morphogenesis.
 

Practical information

  • General public
  • Free

Organizer

  • MEGA.Seminar Organizing Committee

Contact

Tags

5. Biophysics mechanobiology tissue engineering cell mechanics optogenetics synthetic morphogenesis

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