Chen C S, Ingber D E
Department of Surgery, Children's Hospital, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Osteoarthritis Cartilage. 1999 Jan;7(1):81-94. doi: 10.1053/joca.1998.0164.
To elucidate how mechanical stresses that are applied to the whole organism are transmitted to individual cells and transduced into a biochemical response.
In this article, we describe fundamental design principles that are used to stabilize the musculoskeletal system at many different size scales and show that these design features are embodied in one particular form of architecture that is known as tensegrity.
Tensegrity structures are characterized by use of continuous tension and local compression; architecture, prestress (internal stress prior to application of external force), and triangulation play the most critical roles in terms of determining their mechanical stability. In living organisms, use of a hierarchy of tensegrity networks both optimizes structural efficiency and provides a mechanism to mechanically couple the parts with the whole: mechanical stresses applied at the macroscale result in structural rearrangements at the cell and molecular level.
Due to use of tensegrity architecture, mechanical stress is concentrated and focused on signal transducing molecules that physically associate with cell surface molecules that anchor cells to extracellular matrix, such as integrins, and with load-bearing elements within the internal cytoskeleton and nucleus. Mechanochemical transduction may then proceed through local stress-dependent changes in molecular mechanics, thermodynamics, and kinetics within the cell. In this manner, the entire cellular response to stress may be orchestrated and tuned by altering the prestress in the cell, just as changing muscular tone can alter mechanical stability and structural coordination throughout the whole musculoskeletal system.
阐明施加于整个机体的机械应力如何传递至单个细胞并转化为生化反应。
在本文中，我们描述了用于在许多不同尺度上稳定肌肉骨骼系统的基本设计原则，并表明这些设计特征体现在一种被称为张拉整体结构的特定结构形式中。
张拉整体结构的特点是使用连续的张力和局部的压缩；结构、预应力（外力施加前的内部应力）和三角剖分在决定其机械稳定性方面起着最为关键的作用。在生物体中，使用张拉整体网络层次结构既能优化结构效率，又能提供一种将各部分与整体进行机械耦合的机制：在宏观尺度上施加的机械应力会导致细胞和分子水平的结构重排。
由于采用了张拉整体结构，机械应力集中并聚焦于与将细胞锚定到细胞外基质的细胞表面分子（如整合素）以及内部细胞骨架和细胞核内的承重元件物理结合的信号转导分子上。然后，机械化学转导可能通过细胞内分子力学、热力学和动力学中局部应力依赖性变化来进行。通过这种方式，就如同改变肌肉张力可改变整个肌肉骨骼系统的机械稳定性和结构协调性一样，通过改变细胞内的预应力，整个细胞对应力的反应可能会被精心安排和调节。
