highlighted topics Cellular Responses to Mechanical Stress Invited Review: Engineering approaches to cytoskeletal mechanics

ing approaches to cytoskeletal mechanics. J Appl Physiol 89: 2085–2090, 2000.—An outstanding problem in cell biology is how cells sense me-chanical forces and how those forces affect cellular functions. Various biophysical and biochemical mechanisms have been invoked to answer this question. A growing body of evidence indicates that the deformable cytoskeleton (CSK), an intracellular network of interconnected filamen-tous biopolymers, provides a physical basis for transducing mechanical signals into biochemical signals. Therefore, to understand how mechan-ical forces regulate cellular functions, it is important to know how cells respond to changes in the CSK force balance and to identify the under-lying mechanisms that control transmission of mechanical forces throughout the CSK and bring it to equilibrium. Recent developments of new experimental techniques for measuring cell mechanical properties and novel theoretical models of cellular mechanics make it now possible to identify and quantitate the contributions of various CSK structures t