Interested in a #postdoc on nuclear #mechanobiology? We have a fully funded position in the Confinement Mechanobiology Lab designed to help you meet your career goals while researching the rapidly growing field of cellular #confinement. Please get in touch for more info!

The mechanobiology of fibroblast activation in disease Fibroblasts play crucial roles in wound healing, cancer, and fibrosis. Many aspects of these roles are driven by the process known as fibroblast activation. The

There’s tons out there on fibroblast #mechanobiology in disease. In our new review in @aip-publishing.bsky.social, Yeji @cyj8.bsky.social gives the who/what/where/when/how/why of mechanosensitive fibroblast activation, from CAFs to FAFs and nearly everything in between!
pubs.aip.org/aip/apb/arti...

Just a few days to submit for the Sep 9-12 @mbisg.bsky.social conference! Cool feature this year- a #HawkerCentre night with speakers and ECRs. Imagine enjoying Char Kway Teow & chatting #microtubules with someone like Sasha Bershadsky! Register here: www.mbi.nus.edu.sg/events/mbico...

Looking forward, there’s still lots of interesting things to do! How is #chromatin rearranged in stem cells during this process? Can we scale up confinement ‘production’ of MSCs for #tissue #engineering applications? Stay tuned for exciting new work from the Confinement Mechanobiology Lab! (8/8)

We got some help from Brian Burke & @ylleecellbio.bsky.social with a DN-KASH #nesprin construct, allowing us to sever the cytoskeleton from the LINC. Since these cells become osteogenic like WT MSCs, nuclear deformation is sufficient for confinement-induced #differentiation. (7/n)

As the #nucleus is heavily deformed inside this confinement, we asked what was more important for this #differentiation response- A) active force applied on the nuclear envelope or B) simple deformation of the nucleus itself? (6/n)

We also found that when MSCs migrate through tight channels, they become more #osteogenic. One thing we love about microchannels: here, the only way those cells could have gotten to the right side is by confined migration, so we know their #confinement history. (5/n)

One of the first things we noticed was that the cell and nuclear morphology of #MSCs changes as a function of the #confinement they have migrated through, and that this change in morphology persists even after they’ve exited into a 2D unconfined microenvironment. (4/n)

Gao Xu was the first PhD student to join my group when I started at @mbisg.bsky.social‬, and he was excited to dive into this question! (3/n)

The seeds of this work started back in my postdoc- I spent a lot of time watching cancer cells migrate through tight spaces, and wondered how these spaces would affect adult stem cells, given their functional (and #mechanosensitive) output of differentiation (2/n)

Confined Migration Drives Stem Cell Differentiation Human mesenchymal stem cell (hMSC) homing to sites of regeneration requires navigation through mechanically confining extracellular matrix environments, inducing rapid and dramatic morphological adap...

Fresh science! Check out the Confinement Mechanobiology Lab's new paper on how confined migration can drive stem cell differentiation. Let’s do a thread! (1/n)

advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Three weeks left until the abstract submission deadline for our joint MBI-MPI #mechanobiology conference this September in Singapore!

To early career scientists- be sure to apply for a travel award to present your work! mbi.nus.edu.sg/events/mbico...