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...

The principle of dimensionality reduction with PCA is the representation of the dataset ‘X’in terms of eigenvectors ei ∈ RN  of its covariance matrix. The eigenvectors oriented in the direction with the maximum variance of X in RN carry the most      relevant information of X. These eigenvectors are called principal components [8]. Ass...

The microtubule organizing center (MTOC) frequently polarizes to a position in front of the nucleus during cell migration, but recent work has shown conflicting evidence for MTOC location in migratory polarized cells. Here, we show that subcellular localization of the MTOC is modulated by extracellular matrix stiffness. In scratch wound assays as well as single cell migration of mesenchymal ste...

A finite element numerical method is investigated for fractional order elliptic boundary value problems with homogeneous Dirichlet type boundary conditions. It is pointed out that an appropriate stiffness matrix can be obtained by taking the prescribed fractional power of the stiffness matrix corresponding to the non-fractional elliptic operators. It is proved that this approach, which is also ...

In this paper, stiffness of planar translational wire-actuated parallel manipulators is studied. The complete form of the stiffness matrix of the two degrees of freedom manipulators is formulated parametrically. The differential form of the static force balance equations is used to incorporate the variation of wire stiffness with wire length and the change in the Jacobian matrix under external ...

In vitro models of normal mammary epithelium have correlated increased extracellular matrix (ECM) stiffness with malignant phenotypes. However, the role of increased stiffness in this transformation remains unclear because of difficulties in controlling ECM stiffness, composition and architecture independently. Here we demonstrate that interpenetrating networks of reconstituted basement membran...

Background—In ventricular dilatation or hypertrophy, an elevated end-diastolic pressure is often assumed to be secondary to increased myocardial stiffness, but stiffness is rarely measured in vivo because of difficulty. We measured in vitro passive stiffness of volume-or pressure-overloaded myocardium mainly from congenital heart disease. Methods and Results—Endocardial ventricular biopsies wer...