Mechano-bio Systems

Mechano-Gated Ion Channels in Sensory Systems

Living organisms sense their physical environment through cellular mechanotransduction, which converts mechanical forces into electrical and biochemical signals. In turn, signal transduction serves a wide variety of functions, from basic cellular processes as diverse as proliferation, differentiation, migration, and apoptosis up to some of the most sophisticated senses, including touch and hear...

Super Mechano-systems: Fusion of Control and Mechanism

Super Mechano-System is the name of the research project at Tokyo Institute of Technology sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The aim is creating a New Mechanical Systems with self-organizing capabilities of its structure and functions adapting to the environment by the fusion of the control and mechanism. The system may have hyper redundant...

Bio-systems as Self-organizing Quantum Systems

Modeling cardiac mechano-electrical feedback using reaction-diffusion-mechanics systems

In many practically important cases, wave propagation described by the reaction-diffusion equation initiates deformation of the medium. Mathematically, such processes are described by coupled reactiondiffusion-mechanics (RDM) systems. RDM systemswere recently used to study the effects of deformation on wave propagation in cardiac tissue, so called mechano-electrical feedback (MEF). In this arti...

Rabbit models of cardiac mechano-electric and mechano-mechanical coupling

Cardiac auto-regulation involves integrated regulatory loops linking electrics and mechanics in the heart. Whereas mechanical activity is usually seen as 'the endpoint' of cardiac auto-regulation, it is important to appreciate that the heart would not function without feed-back from the mechanical environment to cardiac electrical (mechano-electric coupling, MEC) and mechanical (mechano-mechani...