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When cellular forces became visible

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 21, page 253 (2020)Cite this article

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The history of science features many examples of fields that flourished when a key chemical or physical quantity became measurable. In recent years this has been the case for mechanobiology, the field that studies how physical forces impact cellular form, fate and function. The idea that forces can influence cell behaviour is as old as the laws of mechanics. However, the question of how much force a cell exerts to move, divide, change shape or sense its microenvironment only became experimentally accessible relatively recently, long after biochemists had learnt how to quantify key properties of genes and proteins.

Unlike time or length, a force cannot be directly measured; it can only be inferred from the movement (deformation) that it causes on a material of known properties. In the simplest macroscopic scenario, force is quantified as the extent to which it can deform a spring of known stiffness. The problem of how to translate this simple concept to the microscopic living world was solved by Harris, Wild and Stopak in 1980. The authors reasoned that the forces that cells exert on their underlying substrate, called tractions, could be measured if the substrate was made deformable. The first difficulty was, of course, to synthesize a substrate soft enough that a single cell was able to deform it to a measurable extent. They found a solution that, in retrospect, seems remarkably simple. They deposited a drop of a viscous silicone fluid on a coverslip and then exposed it to a flame. When the exposure was brief, only the outermost layer of the fluid polymerized, giving rise to a thin biocompatible substrate floating on a viscous polymeric fluid.

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References

Original article

  • Harris, A. K., Wild, P. & Stopak, D. Silicone rubber substrata: a new wrinkle in the study of cell locomotion. Science 208, 177–179 (1980)

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Related articles

  • Dembo, M. & Wang, Y. L. Stresses at the cell-to-substrate interface during locomotion of fibroblasts. Biophys. J. 76, 2307–2316 (1999)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Butler, J. P. et al. Traction fields, moments, and strain energy that cells exert on their surroundings. Am. J. Physiol. Cell Physiol. 282, C595–C605 (2002)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

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  1. ICREA and CIBER-BBN at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), The Barcelona Institute for Science and Technology (BIST), Barcelona, Spain

    Xavier Trepat

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  1. Xavier Trepat
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Correspondence to Xavier Trepat.

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Trepat, X. When cellular forces became visible. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 21, 253 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-020-0216-1

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