http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov – Vascular endothelial cell migration, which plays an important role in vascular remodeling, is known to be regulated by hemodynamic forces in the blood vessels. When shear stress is applied on mouse microvessel endothelial cells (bEnd.3) in vitro, cells exhibit upstream migration behavior with respect to the direction of the flow. To determine how shear stress magnitude influences mechanotaxis of the cells, endothelial cells were exposed to different magnitudes of unidirectional shear stress. Read more »

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov – Focal adhesion proteins link cell surface integrins and intracellular actin stress fibers and therefore play an important role in mechanotransduction and cell motility. When endothelial cells are subjected to cyclic mechanical strain, time-lapse imaging revealed that cells underwent significant morphological changes with their resultant long axes aligned away from the strain direction. To explore how this response is regulated by focal adhesion-associated proteins the expression levels of paxillin, focal adhesion kinase (FAK), and zyxin were knocked down using gene silencing techniques. Read more »