Mechanobiology Seminar Series Launch Event
On 11 October 2022, the novel student-led Mechanobiology Seminar Series, organised by MaP Doctoral School and Dr. Céline Labouesse of Prof. Tibbitt's Macromolecular Engineering Laboratory, started out with its first seminar under the title 'Role of physical confinement in cell signaling & cell function'.
Mechanobiology is a wide field of research that covers any topic related to the physical and mechanical understanding of living systems and their applications, bringing together biologists, physicists, engineers and material scientists. For this community, spread across multiple groups and departments at ETH Zurich, Dr. Céline Labouesse and MaP Doctoral School initiated a student-led seminar series where early career scientists get a chance to present their work.
The launch event on 11 October 2022 saw Luezhen Yuan (Mechano-Genomics Group, PSI) and Tamara Zünd (Laboratory of Applied Mechanobiology, D-HEST) addressing the role of physical confinement on cellular function. The audience consisted of about 25 biologists, materials scientists, and engineers. Luezhen showed how physical confinement on micropatterns can trigger fibroblast reprogramming by rewiring transcriptional regulation networks. Tamara showed how nanoporous surfaces contribute to T-cell activation. In both cases, it was clear that confinement, whether at the cell colony scale or at the membrane protrusion scale, has a significant impact on cell activity. One clear take-away from these studies is that you need interdisciplinary input (surface fabrication with controlled pattern size / pore size, cellular assays, bioinformatics etc) to drive these studies. By bringing together doctoral students and scientists from all departments of ETH, the seminar series hopes to foster such collaborations.
