Mechanotransduction in Health and Disease

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editors

Emanuela Jacchetti

Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy, Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "G.Natta"

Dr. Emanuela Jacchetti is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. She is a Physicist that, starting from her PhD, focalized her attention on cell mechanotranduction and their interaction with biomaterials. Her favourite method of investigation is fluorescence microscopy and during her career, she has worked in numerous research and excellence institutes, which have allowed her to increase her knowledge in this exciting field, which allows very high spatial and temporal resolution analyses. In the last years, her research is focalized on two main topics: the investigation of the mechanical processes governing Stem Cells Potency and the Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition.

Francesca Donnaloja

Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy, Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "G.Natta"

Francesca Donnaloja obtained her MSc degree cum laude in Biomedical engineering at Politecnico di Milano. She awarded cum laude her PhD in bioengineering focused on the ERC-funded project NICHOID at the Politecnico di Milano. She investigated the nuclear pore complex role in mechanostransduction pathway combining experimental and computational tools. She has been awarded a “R. Rocca” one-year fellowship at the Biology Department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA. She is now engaged in ERC-CoG-2016 project “MINERVA” at the TechnoBiology Laboratories at the Politecnico di Milano, where she currently deals with the technological and engineering development of the MINERVA platform.

Chiara Martinelli

Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy, Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "G.Natta"

Dr. Chiara Martinelli is a molecular biologist, and she received her PhD in medical nanotechnology from the European School of Molecular Medicine in Milan, Italy. Currently, she is as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "G.Natta" at Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy), working on a FET Open project aimed at developing a bioengineered device designed for validating protocols for biomaterials in vivo models. Her research interests focus on multifunctional nanomaterials, drug delivery, analysis and characterization of biomolecular interactions, and cellular responses to external stimuli.

Collection Overview

In the last two decades, researchers recognized that mechanical stimuli coming from extracellular environment influence the biochemical response of cells and tissues. Indeed, it is known that they play an important role in the context of formation, homeostasis, and repair of tissues, but also in the onset and progression of severe diseases, such as neurodegenerative diseases, laminopathies, cancer.

The mechanotransduction pathway includes several elements among which the main players involved are adhesion proteins, cell cytoskeleton, nuclear complexes and lamina proteins and DNA. Additional factors with an important role in this process are also ions channels or pores as well as second messengers.

The study of mechanotransduction ranges in various fields of investigation; in fact, it has been carried out both by computational approaches, such as molecular dynamics and finite element methods, and experimental ones. In this context, due to the extreme interdisciplinarity of the field, both biochemical (i.e., transcriptomic, and proteomic) and biophysical (i.e., microscopy, and spectroscopy) techniques have been exploited. The experimental approach often involves also advanced bioengineering techniques developing scaffolds with various mechanical properties or bioreactors, able to significantly stress the cells, thus isolating the effect of mechanical stimuli on complex systems, such as cells or tissues.

Despite the great progress on mechanotransduction knowledge, however the phenomenon remains so far not fully understood. In light of that, the current Methods Collection brings together the protocols and techniques to explore this extremely multidisciplinary field, where medicine, biology, engineering, and physics cooperate in order to understand the mechanisms underlying health and disease in living systems.