Mechanobiology of Organoid Systems

Cells can inherently exerted mechanical forces via actomyosin contraction. Moreover, these mechanical forces are transmitted to other cells and extracellular matrix respectively through cell-cell adhesion and cell-matrix adhesion, building up a complex mechanical force transmission network in living organisms. Despite the demonstrated roles of mechanical forces in cell-level behaviors via in vitro cell culture, including cell proliferation, cell differentiation, and cell migration etc., it is still unclear how these mechanical force networks impact complex organ-level functions. The emerging technique of organoid culture provides a proper platform to connect the cellular behaviors with the organ-level functions. Recently, different organoids have been developed to emulate the key functions of the living organs, such as brain organoids, lung organoids, gut organoids and kidney organoids, etc. The studies of mechanobiology using these organoid systems will provide new insight to better understand how mechanical forces regulate the complex organ functions.

Though enormous efforts have been made to figure out how mechanical forces are generated and transmitted between cells, and how these processes impact human health. For example, experimentally, mechanical forces are quantified in in vitro cell culture, ex vivo and in vivo tissues to study how they are involved in cell behaviors and tissue development. Theoretically, computational simulations are developed to mimic how forces regulate biological behaviors. However, due to the complexity of living organisms it is still far away from understanding the basic mechanisms. Answering these questions could pave the basis for developing new mechanical forces-based as well as their downstream pathway-based therapeutics. Organoid systems provide a platform to emulate the key functions of the living organs. The application of organoid system in mechanobiology can provide answers to these questions from the organ-level perspective to comprehensively understand the roles of mechanical forces in living organisms.

Welcome both experimental and computational studies in following themes:

 Developing organoid system to mimic the impacts of mechanical forces on organ functions, such as organ on a chip.
 Investigating impacts of mechanical/biophysical factors in organoid system, such as stiffness, geometries, curvature, and forces, etc..
 Computational modeling / simulation for understating the mechanism by which mechanical forces impact organoid phenotypes.
 Application of organoid model to study the roles of mechanical forces in disease, for example, applying tumor organoids to study the impacts of mechanical forces in metastasis.

Descriptive studies (e.g. gene expression profiles, or transcript, protein, or metabolite levels under particular conditions or in a particular cell type) and studies consisting solely of bioinformatic investigation of publicly available genomic / transcriptomic data do not fall within the scope of the journal unless they are expanded and provide significant biological or mechanistic insight into the process being studied.