Mechanical manipulations and responses at the scale of the cell and beyond

This is a joint program of ICTS with NCBS and MechanoBiology Institute, Singapore.The understanding of biological processes at a cellular and sub-cellular scale has made a big leap forward, thanks to the availability of new microscopy tools that enable sub-diffraction resolution and high-speed live cell / tissue imaging technologies that have made the advance from a qualitative to a quantitative description possible. Recently, the application of a wide variety of techniques to mechanically manipulate single molecules or multi-cellular cell composites has allowed scientists to begin addressing the question of how organisms react to controlled mechanical cues. This two-week long program introduces a scope of  techniques to gain quantitative information of responses of the biological material (at all scales) to perturbations of a mechanical nature, and explores how the combination of theory and experiments will lead to a systematic deciphering of the physics of how living material engages...