(25g) Mechanical Cues and Cell Behavior – Immune, Stem, and Tumor Cell Examples (Invited Speaker)

Tissues range from liquid such as blood to soft or rigid solids like liver or bone, and the past decades have used a diversity of synthetic material and in vivo approaches to show that cells mechanosense such microenvironment physics differences with changes in gene and protein expression as well as cell structure(s) and function. Macrophages are one immune cell type that can be found in nearly all tissues (plus most tumors), and these cells not only respond to such mechanical cues but also recognize stiffness in their main function of phagocytosing. Stem cells with varying levels of differentiation potential also exhibit mechanosensitivity to microenvironment in their proliferation and lineage. Of more recent and major concern for some stem cells is the integrity of their DNA, and evidence of mechanosensitive changes to DNA sequence in stem cells and tumor cells will be described based on methods that range from single cell sequencing to a new chromosome reporter system suitable for rare cell analyses.