Safa Bahareh Tajvidi, Rosenbohm Jordan, Esfahani Amir Monemian, Minnick Grayson, Moghaddam Amir Ostadi, Lavrik Nickolay V, Huang Changjin, Charras Guillaume, Kabla Alexandre, Yang Ruiguo
bioRxiv. 2025 May 9:2024.07.31.606021. doi: 10.1101/2024.07.31.606021.
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 their stress evolution under 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 100s, 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.
上皮细胞会经历不同大小和速率的持久负荷。它们如何适应这些负荷对组织健康有重大影响。然而，关于它们在持续应变下的应力演变仍有许多未知之处。在这里，通过使细胞对承受持续应变，我们报告了一种双峰应力响应，除了通常观察到的应力松弛外，一部分细胞还表现出动态张紧过程，应力在100秒内显著升高，类似于肌肉纤维中的主动回拉。令人惊讶的是，表现出张紧的细胞比例随着应变率的增加而增加。张紧反应伴随着肌动蛋白重塑，对肌动蛋白的扰动会消除这种反应，这支持了细胞收缩性在该反应中的作用。总体而言，我们的数据表明，上皮细胞在短时间尺度上以应变率依赖的方式调整其张力状态以适应持续应变，表明主动回拉行为可能是一种常见的针对环境压力的保护机制。
