Mechanomics: an emerging field between biology and biomechanics

Abstract

Cells sense various in vivo mechanical stimuli, which initiate downstream signaling to mechanical forces. While a body of evidences is presented on the impact of limited mechanical regulators in past decades, the mechanisms how biomechanical responses globally affect cell function need to be addressed. Complexity and diversity of in vivo mechanical clues present distinct patterns of shear flow, tensile stretch, or mechanical compression with various parametric combination of its magnitude, duration, or frequency. Thus, it is required to understand, from the viewpoint of mechanobiology, what mechanical features of cells are, why mechanical properties are different among distinct cell types, and how forces are transduced to downstream biochemical signals. Meanwhile, those in vitro isolated mechanical stimuli are usually coupled together in vivo, suggesting that the different factors that are in effect individually could be canceled out or orchestrated with each other. Evidently, omics analysis, a powerful tool in the field of system biology, is advantageous to combine with mechanobiology and then to map the full-set of mechanically sensitive proteins and transcripts encoded by its genome. This new emerging field, namely mechanomics, makes it possible to elucidate the global responses under systematically-varied mechanical stimuli. This review discusses the current advances in the related fields of mechanomics and elaborates how cells sense external forces and activate the biological responses.

Mechanical Signaling in NF1 Osteoblast Cells

“…the 3D configuration and presence of interstitial fluid in-vivo. The Flexcell system has been a good platform to study the effect of mechano stimulation in many different contexts [45,46]. This system applies an equibiaxial strain to the cells using a flexible silicone bottom plate connected to a computer-controlled vacuum device.…”

Hemodynamic Flow-Induced Mechanotransduction Signaling Influences the Radiation Response of the Vascular Endothelium

“…Shear stress can also act in a reversible manner, i.e., it can act as a potent survival pathway activator of endothelial cells (30). Through mediating the activation of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), flow-adapted endothelial cells maintain a level of nitric oxide that is optimal for normal homeostasis of vascular function (31). In our study, human aortic endothelial cells (HAECs) were subjected to shear stress at 16 dynes/cm 2 and analyzed for eNOS expression.…”

“…Shear stress forces acting on the cell's surface are believed to be transmitted through the cytoskeleton, allowing the activation of several mechanoreceptors within the cell (31,32). The possible existence of so called ''mechanoreceptors'' has, therefore, prompted a number of research groups to localize those receptors that translate mechanical forces into biological signals (33)(34)(35)(36)(37).…”

Mechano-biological Coupling of Cellular Responses to Microgravity

“…This mechano-biological coupling nature raises various related issues, such as, are these physiological changes of astronauts adaptive or pathological and how can we clarify them, can we and how do we determine if these changes are reversible or irreversible, or is there a threshold and can the threshold be enhanced (van Loon 2009;Wang et al 2014b). As a basic element of an organism, the cell is sensitive to its surrounding mechanical environment including types, patterns, and parameters of mechanical load (Wang et al 2014b). Thus, caution should be taken when we attempt to address the issues of what gravitational change is, how space microgravity environment or effect is simulated, and how cellular responses to microgravity environment are mimicked.…”

“…For example, a clinostat or a rotary bioreactor, which is frequently used by space life scientists to test the impacts of the so-called stimulated microgravity (SM), is unable to stimulate the microgravity from the view of mechanical/physical principles, since gravity could not be eliminated on ground as a body force. Instead, (partial) biological effects of space microgravity environment are able to be stimulated as long as the cell movement inside the clinostat or rotary bioreactor behaves like a rigid-body movement (Ayyaswamy and Mukundakrishnan 2007;Wang et al 2014b). The capacities and limitations of the ground-based microgravity stimulators are thoroughly discussed (Herranz et al 2013).…”