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BME Seminar Series: Universal Correlation Between Stiffness and Volume for Cells
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location: BME 3.204
The stiffness of cells is commonly assumed to depend on the stiffness of their surroundings: bone cells are much stiffer than neurons, and each exists in surrounding tissue that matches the cell stiffness. In this talk, I will discuss new measurements of cell stiffness, and show that that cell stiffness is strongly correlated to cell volume. This affects both the mechanics and the gene expression in the cell, and even impacts the differentiation of stem cells. To probe the effects of gene expression, I will discuss lab-on-a-chip developments, using drop-based microfluidics, that provide a full gene expression analysis at the level of individual cells.
Speaker: David A. Weitz, Ph.D.
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Applied Physics
John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University