Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
Blast-induced traumatic brain injury (b-TBI) is a kind of significant injury to soldiers in the current military conflicts. However, the mechanism of b-TBI has not been well understood, and even there are some contradictory conclusions. It is crucial to reveal the dynamic mechanism of brain volume and shear deformations under blast loading for bett...
Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
Collective cell groups are organized to form specific patterns that play an important role in various physiological and pathological processes, such as tissue morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer invasion. Compared to the behavior of single cells, which has been studied intensively from many aspects (cell migration, adhesion, polarization, prol...
Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
Elastic composites containing liquid inclusions exist widely in nature and in engineered systems. The volumetric response of liquid inclusions is important in many cases, such as an isolated cell embedded in an extracellular matrix or an oil pocket embedded within shale. In this study, we developed a model for describing the volumetric response of ...
Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
Tissue stiffness, shear stress, and interstitial pressure constitute major factors of the liver mechanical microenvironment that play a key regulatory role in controlling cell behavior in the liver and progression of liver diseases. In this review, we focus on the characteristics of the liver mechanical microenvironment and summarize cellular respo...
Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
The hanging-drop method has been widely used to fabricate three-dimensional (3D) in vitro tissue models due to its advantages such as being easy to perform, inexpensive, and permitting precise control of cell spheroid formation. The geometry of hanging drop may play a critical role on the formation of cell spheroids, which, however, has not been ex...
Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
The penetration capability of drug nano-carriers (NCs) in biological hydrogels such, as mucus and tumor interstitial matrix, typically influence the efficiency of drug delivery. Therefore, understanding the effect of the physicochemical properties of drug carriers on their diffusion capability in biological hydrogels is important for the design and...
Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
Matrix stiffness has been demonstrated in many studies to adjust the biological behaviors of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). However, in the initial phase of bone restoration, MSCs will encounter a hypoxic microenvironment. Studying the connection existing between the matrix stiffness and biological behavior of MSCs under hypoxic condition can bette...
Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
Cells were suggested to sense matrix rigidity by applying fluctuating forces, but the underlying mechanism remains elusive. Here, with a generic filament-crosslinker modeling system for stress fibers, we demonstrate that high mechanical forces can be induced by specific protein–protein interactions with biased kinetics. Strikingly, we further find ...
Published in Acta Mechanica Sinica
A diffusive–stochastic–viscoelastic model is proposed for the specific adhesion of viscoelastic solids via stochastically formed molecular bonds. In this model, it is assumed that molecular-level behaviors, including the diffusion of mobile adhesion molecules and stochastic reaction between adhesion molecules and binding sites, are Markovian stocha...
