Biomechanics of Vertebrate Hair Cells: Experimental and Computational Analysis

毛细胞是脊椎动物中的一类机械感觉感受器细胞，用于检测声音、头部运动、振动和重力。在将机械刺激转换为神经信号的过程中，第一步是微小的纤毛束的偏转，纤毛束是细胞顶部的一簇毛发状突起。这个项目是一名神经生物学家和一名生物工程师之间的合作生物工程努力，使用一种新的方法来探索这些束的微观力学。显微解剖学技术被用来量化纤毛束的详细结构，这些数据将被用于包含不同结构元素对纤毛束力学的贡献的计算模型中，并用于预测不同形状和大小的纤毛束的性能。一种新的光纤系统技术正在开发中，通过对分离的组织制剂进行直接实验来测量束硬度，以验证模型预测。这些研究将在亚细胞水平上为机械传感机制提供重要的基础和新的信息，并对听觉和其他机械传感系统产生影响，所开发的技术可能在生物工程和生物医学应用以及工业中的微观力学中具有重要的应用。

Hair cells are a class of mechanosensory receptor cells in all vertebrates, which are used to detect sound, head movement, vibration, and gravity. The first step in the process converting the mechanical stimulus to a nerve signal is the deflection of the microscopic bundle, called a ciliary bundle, that is a tuft of hairlike processes on the top of the cell. This project is a collaborative bioengineering effort between a neurobiologist and a bioengineer, using a novel methodology to explore the micromechanics of these bundles. Microscopic anatomical techniques are used to quantify the detailed structures of the ciliary bundles, and these data will be used in a computational model incorporating the contribution of different structural elements to bundle mechanics, and to predict the performance of bundles having different shapes and sizes. A novel fiber-optics system technology is being developed to measure bundle stiffness by direct experiments on an isolated preparation of tissue, to test the model predictions. These studies will provide important fundamental and novel information on mechanosensory mechanisms at the subcellular level, with impact on auditory and other mechanosensory systems, and the technology developed may have important applications in micromechanics in bioengineering and biomedical applications, and in industry.