iCeMS見学グループセミナー：Haguy Wolfenson 博士

このたび、アイセムス見学グループでは、セミナーを以下の通り開催いたします。事前申し込みは不要ですので、皆様のご参加をお待ちしております。

Haguy Wolfenson 博士
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.