Immunobiophysics
How do cells process environmental cues to make decisions?
This simple question is still generating much experimental and theoretical work, at the border of physics, chemistry and biology, with strong implications in medicine. For that, we started the serie of seminar and conferences about immunobiophysics link. You can register for the seminars, they are online and free !!!
The purpose of mechanobiology is to understand how biochemical and physical cues are turned into signals through mechanotransduction.
As part of the LAI lab in Marseille, France link, we (mainly) study lymphocytes and try to decipher (i) how mechanotransduction plays a major role in triggering signalling cascades following cell-neighbourhood interaction; (ii) the cell capacity to continually generate forces, and biomolecule properties to undergo conformational changes in response to piconewton forces, which provides a molecular basis for understanding mechanotransduction; and (iii) how mechanotransduction shapes the guidance cues retrieved by living cells and the information flow they generate.
For that, we focus on force-based biophysical techniques, combined with optical microscopies and quantitative measurements from all of them.
We are also open to other fields, where immune cells and cancer cells are implicated, and we animate the French/Mexican IRP initiative BioPhysImmuno link.
(Adapted from the abstract of âMechanotransduction as a major driver of cell behaviour: mechanisms, and relevance to cell organization and future researchâ, Pierre-Henri Puech & Pierre Bongrand, Open Biol. 2021 Nov;11(11):210256. doi: 10.1098/rsob.210256. link)