Introduction to Cell Mechanics and Mechanobiology

by Christopher R. Jacobs, Hayden Huang, Ronald Y. Kwon

Overview

Introduction to Cell Mechanics and Mechanobiology is designed for a one-semester course in the mechanics of the cell offered to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in biomedical engineering, bioengineering, and mechanical engineering. It teaches a quantitative understanding of the way cells detect, modify, and respond to the physical prope

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135042646
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	11/16/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	350
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Christopher R. Jacobs, Hayden Huang, Ronald Y. Kwon

Table of Contents

Part I. Principles1. Cell Mechanics as a Framework2. Fundamentals of Cell Biology3. Solid Mechanics Primer4. Fluid Mechanics Primer5. Statistical Mechanics PrimerPart II. Practices6. Cell Mechanics in the Laboratory 7. Mechanics of Cellular Polymers8. Polymer Networks and the Cytoskeleton9. Mechanics of the Cell Membrane10. Adhesion, Migration, and Contraction of the Cell11. Mechanotransduction and Intracellular Signaling

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Michele Fornaro, PhD (Midwestern University)
Description: This book presents the mechanical mechanisms that regulate cell biology at a molecular, cellular, and tissue level.
Purpose: It is designed as a textbook for a new field called mechanobiology, which integrates biology and many disciplines of mechanics. Moreover, it offers excellent groundwork in introducing many topics ranging from fluid or solid to statistical or computational mechanics and their importance for cell and tissue behavior.
Audience: The audience includes graduate or advanced undergraduate students in bioengineering or biomedical engineering and researchers working in or interested in a reference in these fields.
Features: Chapters are grouped into two parts covering principles and practices. Part I includes a review of cell biology followed by a complete overview of mechanics and its principal concepts. Part II covers the mechanics of single molecule polymers and their networks, the mechanics of the cell membrane, and relevant topic such as adhesion, migration, contraction and mechanotransduction. The text is supplemented with advanced material meant to stimulate critical thinking, examples, and notes. Each chapter ends with key concepts, problems, and references for further investigation. The book is also accessible online with dedicated resource websites for students and instructors.
Assessment: This book fulfills the need for a reference in a new discipline that combines many different types of mechanics with cell biology. Bridging many disciplines, which at first seem unrelated, opens new perspectives and novel applications for topics conventionally covered in more traditional courses in either the engineering or biology fields. The supplementary material enables learning at different levels of complexity and makes the book suitable for students with different backgrounds as well as for researchers and technicians working in the field. Finally, the accompanying website provides useful tools for both students and instructors, such as computer simulation modules, color figures, videos and animations, and the solutions to the end-of-chapter problems for self-evaluation.

Doody's Review Service

"The new text from Jacobs, Huang, and Kwon is fully worthy of the honor of being the first text reviewed in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering. After reading through the clear, simple, but rigorous text, I can say that their work does far more than just tie together some important notes in a single binding....this text is potentially transformative for the field, much in the way that the famous texts by Beer and Johnston, in the 1960s were transformative for the undergraduate study of mechanics of materials and machines." - Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering

"This excellent book by a group of internationally recognized authors meets a real existing need in contemporary bioengineering education, and it does it effectively and successfully....The book was exactly what I wanted; it was entirely devoted to cell-scale problems, with numerous examples, each providing the relevant engineering or mathematical formulation, at a level suitable for good undergrad BME students....All chapters are comprehensible, logically-built and concise, and each is supported by high-quality graphics which add very much to the clarity of the contents...this book is a 'must-have'." - Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering

“…[Introduction to Cell Mechanics and Mechanobiology] touches on all the main current techniques used to apply force to cells and to measure the forces exerted by cells….the physics behind them is well explained and derived…The book sets up a good context for why one would want to study mechanobiology and gives some good tips for designing an experiment, taking into account the fundamental differences in biology and engineering practices.”
- Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine

From the Publisher