Director’s Statement

Living cells are continuously exposed to mechanical forces while at the same time physically influencing and adapting to their surroundings.

Recent progress has led to the realization of an existing and all-encompassing “mechanobiome”, where forces are sensed, transduced, and exerted as part of a broad range of processes, both physiological and pathophysiological. This emerging concept remains, by and large, descriptive and phenomenological.

While these mechanically-driven phenomena touch almost every fundamental process in biology, their molecular mechanisms are yet to be established. This represents a unique greenfield opportunity that spans naturally from the most basic biology to the understanding and treatment of diseases where mechanobiology plays a defining role (i.e., metastatic cancer, hearing loss, cardiovascular disease, somatosensory and musculoskeletal ailments).

Thus, the mission of the Center for Mechanical Excitability (CME) is to lead the development of this nascent discipline, at the mechanistic and discovery science levels.

The Center for Mechanical Excitability (CME) has been conceived as a highly interactive, tightly integrated and multidisciplinary effort focused on elucidating the relationship between structure, dynamics and function in a variety of mechanosensitive biological systems. At a basic level, the main goal of this center is to decode the general mechanistic principles that relate function with protein movement, force transduction and its associated fluctuation dynamics.

These relationships are complex and any such understanding ultimately is based on atomic structures, for they represent the foundation from which functional and mechanistic insights must be framed in molecular terms that ultimately explain biological processes at the mesoscale. The next frontier is then to pioneer new technologies and approaches that elaborate the interplay between structure and its role in governing mechanical transduction, signaling and its role in complex biological phenomena (sensory physiology, development, signaling). Knowledge of how these fundamental phenomena control the mechanobiome function will be required to understand normal cellular physiology and pathophysiologic dysfunction.

The CME has been organized to acquire this fundamental knowledge. A truly world class team has been assembled to carry out, in a highly collaborative and integrative way, the key experiments that will transform our fundamental understanding of the role protein dynamics play in linking structure and function.