It’s done, my first-ever paper was published in @NatureComms ! #PhDlife #biophysics.In it, we combined #optogenetics and #TissueEng to explore tissue rheology. Let me walk you through it… ⤵️.

Congrats Arthur!.

RT @RaimonSunyer: Just wrapped up the #CellMech2023 meeting. It was a great experience. Here are some highlights from the talks I attended.….

Travailler au CNRS, avantages : emploi à vie garanti (sauf peut-être en cas de meurtre avéré d'un collègue ?), impunité pendant 8 ans en cas de faute grave. Inconvénient : les collègues sont potentiellement des "harceleurs" (pour rester gentil. ).

My paper featured in the @NatureComms "From molecules and cells to organisms" Editor's Highlights page ! 🥳

RT @AJKowaltowski: Email I sent in response to @NatureComms´s request for me to act as a reviewer today (part 1 of 2). #OpenAccess isn´t o….

And not to forget of course, many thanks to @LeioValon and @mcoppey who created and gifted us the optogenetic fibroblast cell lines in the first place!.

This publication was the results of my #PhD work, but nothing would have been possible without the support of my team in @liphy_lab : my supervisors Thomas Boudou and Martial Balland, Giovanni Capello and Jean Revilloud, and of course my colleague and friend @ArturRuppel93 😊.

So with this system, we can measure the local elasticity and viscosity of the tissues, in real-time and without damaging them. And this, without using anything else than light and the tissues' own cells.

3/ We can measure the elastic modulus and the delay between max. stress and max. stretch (which informs us of the viscosity of the tissue). Elasticity varies with boundary condition stiffness, maturation time and the density/integrity of the ECM.

2/ When we make part of the tissue contract, we see a delay between the maximum stress, and the maximum stretch: our tissues are viscoelastic.

But on 4 pillars, the orientation of the cells/ECM changes with the position in the tissue (isotropic in the middle, aligned on the sides), and so does the orientation of the contraction.

With this system, we showed 3 things : . 1/ The orientation of the contraction depends on the geometry of the tissue: on a 2 pillars tissue, the cells' cytoskeleton and the ECM are oriented along the tissue's main axis, and so is the contraction.

And by tracking the displacement of the pillars during the contraction of the cells, we can determine the stress in the tissues, while PIV analysis gives us an idea of the strain: we have everything to plot stress-strain curves!.

Well, our method was to ask them to pull on the tissue themselves and see what happens! To do that, we used engineered microtissues including optogenetic fibroblasts: they contract when exposed to blue light. This way, we can use some cells as actuators of the rest of the tissue:

One common way to learn about tissue's mechanical properties is to pull on them and see how they deform. But these forces are different from the ones cells would impose: how do you know what the cells really experience when they contract?.

A very nice tool for #mechanobiology from MICROBS team lead by @mssakar in @EPFL. A team I now had the pleasure to join 2 weeks ago! 😃 .Thanks @IdylleLabs for their trust.

RT @EPFL: Une plateforme de microchirurgie robotisée permettant d’effectuer des dissections de haute précision et de résolution micrométriq….

This week was my very first week as a Post-doc in @EPFL in the lab of @mssakar. The goal of my project will be to do develop #TissueEng methods using cell mechanics, mechanobiology and #optogenetics. I am glad I joined such a nive place and team ! :D

RT @jdcampolargo: @drmichaellevin Lewis Wolpert said: "Developmental biology is like a conjuring trick: when it goes right, you don't see h….