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SUMMARY:THE SHAPE AND MECHANICS OF MAMMALIAN CELLS
LOCATION:Chemistry A101
TZID:America/Denver
DTSTART:20180101T000000
UID:2026-04-26-12-44-45@natsci.colostate.edu
DTSTAMP:20260426T124445
Description:About the Seminar:\n\nCells are material objects with specific 
 mechanical properties\, which are important for proper function\, but unli
 ke passive substances\, the material properties of cells are strongly affe
 cted by life processes. In this talk I will discuss two aspects of cells a
 s active materials\, which my lab has been interested in.\nFirstly\, cells
  are viscoelastic materials\, and a phenomenological picture of the cellul
 ar cytoplasm is one of a viscoelastic material fluidized by active forces 
 created by energy-consuming life processes. Characterizing viscoelasticity
  along with active force generation requires a combination of passive part
 icle-tracking microrheology (PMR) and active microrheology using laser or 
 magnetic tweezers. In this talk I will discuss our attempts to develop sim
 pler single-cell assays of cellular mechanical properties based on PMR alo
 ne\, using mitochondria as well as fluorescent beads as probe particles.\n
 The second property I will talk about is morphology: cells acquire a speci
 fic morphology when spreading on surfaces. My group has been exploring the
  hypothesis that cell morphology or shape carries useful information about
  the state of the cell\, and in particular it is a marker for tumor aggres
 siveness. In order to explore this hypothesis we culture osteosarcoma and 
 breast cancer cell lines with different phenotypes\, image them on two dim
 ensional substrates\, quantify their shape characteristics and use statist
 ical analysis and neural networks to analyze shape differences and build p
 redictive models for inferring cancer invasiveness based on morphology. 4:
 00 pm
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