Connectiveness between micro and macroscopic biological flows

特定的宏观功能是通过整合生物系统中的微观现象来实现的。换句话说，生物系统将通过采用各种环境效应来实现功能。在这个项目中，我们一直在探索生物流动如何在生物体内实现功能，此外，我们还考虑到固体力学，生理学，细胞生物学以及流体力学。国际小组的研究人员聚集在一起解决这个问题，并讨论了与生物系统功能直接相关的生物流现象的各个方面。1998年8月，我们在札幌举行了一次会议，讨论了生物流的几个主题。我们讨论的主题是呼吸力学，心血管流体力学，细胞力学和运输现象。我们还强调了内皮细胞在力学刺激下的功能，并试图了解内皮细胞的力学转导机制。生物系统是由各个层次的生物单元整合而成的，我们应该通过各个层次的生物现象的整合来理解生物的功能。近年来，生物系统的整合作用越来越受到重视，并将为今后认识生物系统提供新的途径。

The specific macroscopic function is achieved by integrating the microscopic phenomena in the biological system. In other words, the biological system will achieve the function by adopting the various environmental effects. In this project, we had been exploiting how the biological flow achieve the function in the living body, furthermore we took into account the solid mechanics, physiology, cell biology in addition to the fluid mechanics. The researchers in the international group got tother to tackle this problem and discuss various aspects of the biological flow phenomena being directly related to the function in the biological system. We had the meeting at Sapporo on last August, in 1998 to discuss several subjects of biological flow. The subjects we discussed were respiratory mechanics, cardiovascular fluid mechanics, cellular mechanics and transport phenomena. We also emphasized the function of endothelial cells under the mechanical stimulus and tried to understand the mechanotransduction mechanism of endothelial cells. The biological system is constructed by integrating the various level of biological units and we should understand the biological function through the integration of biological phenomena in the various levels. The integration becomes more important recently and shoud offer the new way of understanding thr biological system in the future.