iCeMS Kengaku Group Seminar: Dr Haguy Wolfenson

This notice is to inform you of an upcoming seminar, all researchers are welcomed to attend. No registration is required.

Dr Haguy Wolfenson
Assistant Professor, Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Mechanisms of short- and long-term mechanosensing
Cells respond to mechanical signals from their environment in a variety of ways. In particular, the rigidity of the extracellular matrix (ECM) to which cells adhere is a critical determinant of the most fundamental cellular processes, including cell migration, differentiation, death, and growth. In order to test the rigidity of the ECM, cells apply cytoskeletal-based forces to it; however, there are fundamental aspects of this ‘mechanosensing’ process that are poorly understood. In my talk, I will discuss our recent findings on the kinetics of contractile force generation during mechanosensing. Based on a mathematical model of cell contractility, we predict that for a broad range of physiological and laboratory conditions the contractile force scales with the environment‘s rigidity, where the proportionality factor is an intrinsic, cell-specific time-dependent contractile displacement that is non-mechanosensitive, i.e. independent of the environment’s rigidity. Our extensive experiments on various adherent cells show that, as predicted, the time-dependent contractile displacement is independent of the rigidity, varied more than 15-fold. Furthermore, we show that the intrinsic time-dependent contractile displacement is directly related to the evolution of the actomyosin network, properly quantified by the time-dependent concentration of F-actin. The emerging picture unifies various other existing observations on cellular contractility and provides a novel framework to address the process of mechanosensing.