Mammalian skeletal muscles undergo adaptation in response to changes in the functional demands upon them, involving mechanical-stress-induced cellular signaling called "mechanotransduction." We hypothesized that p130Cas, which is reported to act as a mechanosensor that transduces mechanical extension into cellular signaling, plays an important role in maintaining and promoting skeletal muscle a...

Amorphous solids increase their stress as a function of an applied strain until a mechanical yield point whereupon the stress cannot increase anymore, afterward exhibiting a steady state with a constant mean stress. In stress-controlled experiments, the system simply breaks when pushed beyond this mean stress. The ubiquity of this phenomenon over a huge variety of amorphous solids calls for a g...

introduction: attachment of blood and tissue cells to the extracellular matrix (ecm) is done with the help of specific joints, which are made between cells’ receptors and matrixes’ ligands. this interaction is vital for many biological activities such as cell migration, cancer development, and wound healing. the purpose of this study is to model a 3-dimensional cell by abaqus commercial softwar...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Because plants protect each other from wind, stand density affects both the light climate and the amount of mechanical stress experienced by plants. But the potential interactive effects of mechanical stress and canopy shading on plant growth have rarely been investigated and never in stoloniferous plants which, due to their creeping growth form, can be expected to respond d...

Mechanical stresses due to blood flow regulate vascular endothelial cell structure and function and play a key role in arterial physiology and pathology. In particular, the development of atherosclerosis has been shown to correlate with regions of disturbed blood flow where endothelial cells are round and have a randomly organized cytoskeleton. Thus, deciphering the relation between the mechani...

Mechanical stress which would cause deleterious adhesive effects on podocytes is considered a major contributor to the early progress of diabetic nephropathy (DN). Our previous study has shown that spironolactone could ameliorate podocytic adhesive capacity in diabetic rats. Autophagy has been reported to have a protective role against renal injury. The present study investigated the underlying...

BACKGROUND This study assessed the reduction in surgeon stress associated with savings in procedure time for mechanical fixation of an intraperitoneal onlay mesh (IPOM) compared to a traditional suture fixation in open ventral hernia repair. STUDY DESIGN Nine general surgeons performed 36 open IPOM fixation procedures in porcine model. Each surgeon conducted two mechanical (using ETHICON SECU...

Morphogenesis, the process by which all complex biological structures are formed, is driven by an intricate interplay between genes, growth, as well as intra- and intercellular forces. While the expression of different genes changes the mechanical properties and shapes of cells, growth exerts forces in response to which tissues, organs and more complex structures are shaped. This is exemplified...

Recently we demonstrated that mechanical stress induces apoptosis of vascular smooth muscle cells in vitro and in vein grafts (Mayr et al. FASEB J. 2000;15:261-270). The current study was designed to investigate molecular mechanisms of mechanical stretch-induced apoptosis. Smooth muscle cells cultivated on silicone elastomer plates precoated with collagen I, elastin, laminin, or Pronectin were ...