In recent decades, the pervasiveness of increased arterial stiffness in patients with cardiovascular disease has become increasingly apparent. Though, this phenomenon has been well documented in humans and animal models of disease for well over a century, there has been surprisingly limited development in a deeper mechanistic understanding of arterial stiffness. Much of the historical literatur...

Directional mesenchymal cell invasion in vivo is understood to be a stimulated event and to be regulated by cytokines, chemokines, and types of extracellular matrix (ECM). Instead, by focusing on the cellular response to ECM stiffness, we found that soft ECM (low stiffness) itself is sufficient to prevent stable cell-to-cell adherens junction formation, up-regulate matrix metalloproteinase (MMP...

Arterial stiffening accompanies both aging and atherosclerosis, and age-related stiffening of the arterial intima increases RhoA activity and cell contractility contributing to increased endothelium permeability. Notably, statins are 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A (HMG-CoA) reductase inhibitors whose pleiotropic effects include disrupting small GTPase activity; therefore, we hypothesized...

Epithelial cells disengage from their clusters and become motile by undergoing epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), an essential process for both embryonic development and tumor metastasis. Growing evidence suggests that high extracellular matrix (ECM) stiffness induces EMT. In reality, epithelial clusters reside in a heterogeneous microenvironment whose mechanical properties vary not on...

B = signed Boolean matrix C = damping matrix f = vector of external forces G = matrix of associated modes g = vector of connecting forces K = stiffness matrix L = Boolean localization matrix M = mass matrix q = vector of unique degrees of freedom R = reduction matrix r = vector of residual forces t = time u = vector of degrees of freedom Y = receptance matrix Z = dynamic stiffness matrix = vect...

The performance of finite element computation depends strongly on the quality of the geometric mesh and the efficiency of the numerical solution of the linear systems resulting from the discretization of partial differential equation (PDE) models. It is common knowledge that mesh geometry affects not only the approximation error of the finite element solution but also the spectral properties of...

In this paper, following a two-stage methodology, the differential quadrature element (DQE) model of a three-story frame structure is updated for the vibration analysis. In the first stage, the mass and stiffness matrices are updated using the experimental natural frequencies. Then, having the updated mass and stiffness matrices, the structural damping matrix is updated to minimize the error be...

Matrix stiffness strongly influences growth, differentiation and function of adherent cells. On the macro scale the stiffness of tissues and organs within the human body span several orders of magnitude. Much less is known about how stiffness varies spatially within tissues, and what the scope and spatial scale of stiffness changes are in disease processes that result in tissue remodeling. To b...

Aggravated behaviors of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) will occur after inadequate thermal ablation. However, its underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. Here, we assessed whether the increased matrix stiffness after thermal ablation could promote the progression of residual HCC. Heat-treated residual HCC cells were cultured on tailorable 3D gel with different matrix stiffness, simulati...