Nuclear membrane rupture, nuclear membrane re-sealing, nuclear deformation, gene expression, etc.
Fibroblast, cancer cells, immune cells, endothelial cells, stem cells, neurons
Biophysics, mechanotransduction and tissue engineering, cancer and metastasis, cell senescence and aging, neurobiology, immune response, and others
Dynamic confiners – Mechanobiology
Dantas et al. Nuclear tension controls mitotic entry by regulating cyclin B1 nuclear translocation. JCB, 2022
In this manuscript the authors used our dynamic confiners with two confinement hights, 8µm that corresponds to a low confinement pressure for their epithelial cell model (RPE cells) and 3µm that results in high confinement condition for RPE. By using nuclear localisation signal (NLS in green) as a proxy for nuclear envelope rupture, the authors observed leakage of NLS in the cytoplasm in the condition of high confinement (3µm)
Microchannels – Cancer and metastasis
Chen YQ et al. Snail Augments Nuclear Deformability to Promote Lymph Node Metastasis of Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma. Front Cell Dev Biol, 2022
In this manuscript the authors used our microchannels of different heights (12, 16 and 18µm) to confine and induce nuclear deformation of cells head and neck squamous carcinoma (HNSCC) cells derived from mice with lymph node metastasis (SAS-LN) and without lymph node metastasis (SAS). At the high confinement condition of 12µm, the authors observed that the SAS-LN were able to migrate better in the microchannels (more cells) and that the nuclei were elongated (30 µm in SAS-LN versus 20 µm of SAS). This suggested that the nuclear flexibility could confer HNSCC an advantage in tissue invasion and metastasis.
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