English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Open

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Insights

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Zendy Tools

Zendy Plus

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Tuning of active prestress e.g. through activity of molecular motorsconstitutes a powerful cellular tool to adjust cellular stiffness throughnonlinear material properties. Understanding this tool is an importantprerequisite for our comprehension of cellular force response, cell shapedynamics and tissue organisation. Experimental data obtained fromcell-mechanical measurements often show a simple linear dependence betweenmechanical prestress and measured differential elastic moduli. While theseexperimental findings could point to stress-induced structural changes in thematerial, we propose here a surprisingly simple alternative explanation in atheoretical study. We show how geometrical effects can give rise to increasedcellular force response of cells in the presence of active prestress. Theassociated effective stress-stiffening is disconnected from actualstress-induced changes of the elastic modulus and should therefore be regardedas an apparent stiffening of the material. We argue that new approaches inexperimental design are necessary to separate this apparent stress-stiffeningdue to geometrical effects from actual nonlinearities of the elastic modulus inprestressed cellular material.

Active prestress leads to an apparent stiffening of cells through geometrical effects