📣 Paper alert 📣 Our joint work with the group of Peter Bastian on the positioning of stress fibers in mechanically challenged cells is now out in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids This work was technically very challenging, so it deserves a 🧵 for explanations ... - ThreadSky

ulrichschwarz.bsky.social • 95 days ago

📣 Paper alert 📣

Our joint work with the group of Peter Bastian on the positioning of stress fibers in mechanically challenged cells is now out in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids

This work was technically very challenging, so it deserves a 🧵 for explanations ...

Comments

ulrichschwarz.bsky.social•95 days ago

(2/n) Stress fibers have many functions in adherent cells, but one main purpose seems to be to protect them from mechanical damage and to ensure structural integrity, because they often form in stressful situations, as reviewed e.g. here https://doi.org/10.1242/jcs.018473

ulrichschwarz.bsky.social•95 days ago

(3/n) For example, in this cool experiment using 3D-printed scaffolds it has been shown that stress fibers form quickly when cells are repeatedly stretched at one adhesion point https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biomaterials.2014.12.018

ulrichschwarz.bsky.social•95 days ago

(4/n) The mechanisms underlying stress fiber formation are very complicated and involve many molecular players, including actin, non-muscle myosin II, tropomyosin, a-actinin and zyxin, as reviewed e.g. here https://doi.org/10.1242/jcs.098087

ulrichschwarz.bsky.social•95 days ago

(5/n) It is hard to model this, so we were thinking about a functional approach: what if we only asked how to position stress fibers in order to avoid mechanical stress in the cell? Stress can be calculated in continuum mechanics, but what is a good model for a stress fiber in continuum mechanics?

ulrichschwarz.bsky.social•95 days ago

(6/n) Discussing this question in our cluster of excellence STRUCTURES with Peter Bastian from applied mathematics, we found an answer: contractile beams embedded in a bulk elasticity can be efficiently simulated with the cut finite element method https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71431-8_2

ulrichschwarz.bsky.social•95 days ago

(7/n) To simulate the statistics of many stress fibers and to combine them with genetic algorithms as optimization scheme, we implemented them in the #FEM software environment DUNE https://www.dune-project.org

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