MECHANOBIOLOGY...A NEW SPECIALTY TO THOSE OUTSIDE THE RESEARCH WORLD

How I wish it was easier to find the things in life that really interest me. One has to do a lot of looking because the media does little to help those of us who don't care for a second by second description of every disaster for days, as though nothing else in the world is happening at the same time. I've just discovered a new specialty called MechanoBiology (a field linking mechanics and biology).

Today from Science Daily, I learned this: "Carnegie Mellon University's Philip R. LeDuc and his collaborators in Massachusetts and Taiwan have discovered a new function of a protein that could ultimately unlock the mystery of how these workhorses of the body play a central role in the mechanics of biological processes in people." LeDuc, ia an associate professor of mechanical engineering with courtesy appointments in the Biomedical Engineering, Biological Sciences and Computational Biology departments.

"For over 15 years, researchers have been mainly focusing on a protein called Integrin to study these cell functions, but our team found that another lesser known protein called Syndecan-4 is extremely important in cell behavior in a field called MechanoBiology (a field linking mechanics and biology). Syndecan-4 is known to play an essential role in a variety of diseases like cancer," LeDuc said. Essentially what his research does is take a look at how a protein's shape and form determines how it functions in the human body from a mechanics perspective. "Proteins are composed of long chains of amino acids than can form bonds with other molecules in a chain, kinking, twisting and folding into complicated, three-dimensional shapes, such as helices or densely furrowed globular structures."

"These folded shapes are immensely important because they can define a protein's function in the cell," said LeDuc, who is also developing novel biologically inspired diagnostic approaches and materials as well as computational methods to understand molecular behavior."

"Misguided proteins have been linked to disease such as cancer, arthritis and wound healing, among others," LeDuc said. "Our research is looking at how protein shapes affect cells and how cell biomechanics impacts the entire process."

For those of you who might understand what I do not, Syndecan-4 binding to the high affinity heparin-binding domain of fibronectin drives focal adhesion formation in fibroblasts. Woods A, Longley RL, Tumova S, Couchman JR. Department of Cell Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, 35294-0019, USA. awoods@cellbio.bhs.uab.edu, click here.