Cell mechanics in confinement
Cells in the body are squeezed by their neighbours and by the matrix around them, and this changes how they move and how they decide their fate. We built a method to compress migrating cells gently and uniformly, and to image them while they respond (Srivastava, Kay and Kabla, Molecular Biology of the Cell 2017). With Robert Kay (MRC LMB), we showed that mild squashing makes cells switch from pseudopods to blebs, a movement driven by fluid pressure, and that this depends on the Piezo stretch-activated channel (Srivastava et al., PNAS 2020). At the scale of the nucleus, embryonic stem cells that are leaving pluripotency have auxetic nuclei: when stretched, they get wider rather than thinner (Pagliara et al., Nature Materials 2014, led by Kevin Chalut).