video: Muscles stretch and contract when we walk, and skin splits open and knits back together when we get a paper cut. These and many other kinds of tissues experience what researchers call contractile forces as they perform their everyday tasks in our bodies. To find out more about how contractile forces influence cell behavior, the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences talked with University of Pennsylvania bioengineer Christopher Chen and his team, who built a microscopic stretch-detector with NIGMS support and compared measurements in real tissues to a computer simulation. view more
Credit: Stephanie Dutchen, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health