Injury of limb nerves leading to neuropathic pain mostly affects deep somatic nerves including muscle nerves. Here, we investigated the functional properties of injured afferent fibers innervating the lateral gastrocnemius-soleus muscle 4-13 h [time period (TP) I] and 4-7 days (TP II) after nerve crush in anesthetized rats using neurophysiological recordings from either the sciatic nerve (165 A...

Introduction A particularly desirable feature of controlled drug delivery is self-regulation, wherein physiological feedback actively regulates release kinetics. Extant systems in this domain commonly employ stimuli-responsive vehicles that rely on internal triggers to precipitate release, such as temperature, pH, or chemical reactions. 2 The sensitivity of these triggers can be tuned by biomat...

Biological membranes are capacitors that can be charged by applying a field across the membrane. The charges on the capacitor exert a force on the membrane that leads to electrostriction, i.e. a thinning of the membrane. Since the force is quadratic in voltage, negative and positive voltage have an identical influence on the physics of symmetric membranes. However, this is not the case for a me...

Osteocytes are the basic bone cells and are located in lacunae inside the bone matrix. Each osteocyte is connected to its neighbours through tiny channels (canaliculi) with a diameter of less than a micrometer. This osteocyte network plays an important role in mechanically induced adaptive bone remodeling, whereby the individual osteocytes work as mechano-sensors to detect states of local under...

156 To Burst or Not To Burst: Osmotic Regulation in a Protocell Model Through Precursor Mechano-Sensitive Channels Ben Shirt-Ediss, Fabio Mavelli, and Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo 1Department for Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of The Basque Country, Spain 2ICREA-Complex Systems Lab, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain 3Chemistry Department, University of Bari, Italy 4Biophysics Research Unit (CSIC...

Skeletal regeneration and bone fracture repair involves complex cellular and molecular events that result in new bone formation. Many of the critical steps during bone healing are dependent on the local mechanical environment in the healing tissue. Computational models are used together with mechano-regulation algorithms to predict the influence of mechanical stimuli on the tissue differentiati...

The exponential growth and ubiquitous use of mobile electronics supported by the Internet Things (IoT) is leading to an increasing need self-powered wearable electronic devices. In particular, converting electrical energy from magnetic fields very appealing for development a sustainable power sources/sensing tools. Magneto-mechano-electric conversion effective way convert into electricity low a...

The healing of bone defects is a challenge for both tissue engineering and modern orthopaedics. This problem has been addressed through the study of scaffold constructs combined with mechanoregulatory theories, disregarding the influence of chemical factors and their respective delivery devices. Of the chemical factors involved in the bone healing process, bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2) h...

Most long-bone fractures heal through indirect or secondary fracture healing, a complex process in which endochondral ossification is an essential part and bone is regenerated by tissue differentiation. This process is sensitive to the mechanical environment, and several authors have proposed mechano-regulation algorithms to describe it using strain, pore pressure and/or interstitial fluid velo...

BACKGROUND Galanin is expressed at low levels in the intact sensory neurons of the dorsal root ganglia with a dramatic increase after peripheral nerve injury. The neuropeptide is also expressed in primary afferent terminals in the dorsal horn, spinal inter-neurons and in a number of brain regions known to modulate nociception. Intrathecal administration of galanin modulates sensory responses in...