With the re-emergence of microalgae as a replacement feedstock for petroleum-derived oils, researchers are working to understand its chemical and mechanical behavior. In this work, the mechanical properties of microalgae, Scenedesmus dimorphus, were investigated at the subcellular level to determine the elastic response of cells that were in an aqueous and dried state using nano-scale indentation through atomic force microscopy. The elastic modulus of single-celled S. dimorphus cells increased over tenfold from an aqueous state to a dried state, which allows us to better understand the biophysical response of microalgae to stress.

Mechanobiology involves the investigation of mechanical forces and their effect on the development, physiology, and pathology of biological systems. The human body has garnered much attention from many groups in the field, as mechanical forces have been shown to influence almost all aspects of human life ranging from breathing to cancer metastasis. Beyond being influential in human systems, mechanical forces have also been shown to impact nonhuman systems such as algae and zebrafish. Studies of nonhuman and human systems at the cellular level have primarily been done in two-dimensional (2D) environments, but most of these systems reside in three-dimensional (3D) environments. Furthermore, outcomes obtained from 3D studies are often quite different than those from 2D studies. We present here an overview of a select group of human and nonhuman systems in 2D and 3D environments. We also highlight mechanobiological approaches and their respective implications for human and nonhuman physiology.

The response of individual cells at the micro-scale in cell mechanics is important in understanding how they are affected by changing environments. To control cell stresses, microfluidics can be implemented since there is tremendous control over the geometry of the devices. Designing microfluidic devices to induce and manipulate stress levels on biological cells can be aided by computational modeling approaches. Such approaches serve as an efficient precursor to fabricating various microfluidic geometries that induce predictable levels of stress on biological cells, based on their mechanical properties. Here, a three-dimensional, multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling approach was implemented for soft biological materials. The computational model incorporates the physics of the particle dynamics, fluid dynamics and solid mechanics, which allows us to study how stresses affect the cells. By using an Eulerian-Lagrangian approach to treat the fluid domain as a continuum in the microfluidics, we are conducting studies of the cells' movement and the stresses applied to the cell. As a result of our studies, we were able to determine that a channel with periodically alternating columns of obstacles was capable of stressing cells at the highest rate, and that microfluidic systems can be engineered to impose heterogenous cell stresses through geometric configuring. We found that when using controlled geometries of the microfluidics channels with staggered obstructions, we could increase the maximum cell stress by nearly 200 times over cells flowing through microfluidic channels with no obstructions. Incorporating computational modeling in the design of microfluidic configurations for controllable cell stressing could help in the design of microfludic devices for stressing cells such as cell homogenizers.

From consumer productions to energy production, algae is used in many industrial processes. Understanding the mechanical behavior of algae is important to optimize these processes. To obtain a better understanding of algae cell response, we mechanically characterized single, dried Scenedesmus dimorphus cells. To accomplish this, we used atomic force microscopy (AFM) to image S. dimorphus cells, which enabled us to map the AFM measurements to a location on the individual cells. We were then able to perform force measurements on the AFM to determine the Young’s modulus of S. dimorphus. These findings enable a more detailed understanding of the mechanical properties of a single S. dimorphus cell, which may be useful in many applications.

No abstract