Tajvidi Safa, B;
Rosenbohm, J;
Monemian Esfahani, A;
Minnick, G;
Ostadi Moghaddam, A;
Lavrik, NV;
Huang, C;
... Yang, R; + view all
(2025)
Sustained strain applied at high rates drives dynamic tensioning in epithelial cells.
Communications Biology
, 8
, Article 843. 10.1038/s42003-025-08210-9.
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Abstract
Epithelial cells experience long lasting loads of different magnitudes and rates. How they adapt to these loads strongly impacts tissue health. Yet, much remains unknown about the evolution of cellular stress in response to sustained strain. Here, by subjecting cell pairs to sustained strain, we report a bimodal stress response, where in addition to the typically observed stress relaxation, a subset of cells exhibits a dynamic tensioning process with significant elevation in stress within 100 s, resembling active pulling-back in muscle fibers. Strikingly, the fraction of cells exhibiting tensioning increases with increasing strain rate. The tensioning response is accompanied by actin remodeling, and perturbation to actin abrogates it, supporting cell contractility’s role in the response. Collectively, our data show that epithelial cells adjust their tensional states over short timescales in a strain-rate dependent manner to adapt to sustained strains, demonstrating that the active pulling-back behavior could be a common protective mechanism against environmental stress.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Sustained strain applied at high rates drives dynamic tensioning in epithelial cells |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s42003-025-08210-9 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-08210-9 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > London Centre for Nanotechnology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10211223 |
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