Physical forces arising in the cellular microenvironment have been hypothesized to play a major role in governing cell function. Moreover, it is thought that gene regulation may be sensitive to nuclear deformations taking place in response to extracellular forces over short and long timescales. Although nuclear responses to mechanical stimuli over long timescales are relatively well studied, the short-term responses are poorly understood. Therefore, to characterize the short-term instantaneous deformation of the nucleus in a mechanically dynamic environment, we exposed MDCK epithelial monolayers to varying mechanical strain fields. The results reveal that nuclei deform anisotropically in response to substrate strain, specifically, the minor nuclear axis is significantly more deformable than the major axis. We show that upon microtubule depolymerization, nuclear deformation anisotropy completely disappears. Moreover, the removal of actin causes a significant increase in nuclear deformation along the minor axis and a corresponding increase in mechanical anisotropy. The results demonstrate that the nucleus deforms in a manner that is very much dependent on the direction of strain and the characteristics of the strain field. Actin and microtubules also appear to play distinct roles in controlling the anisotropic deformation of the nucleus in response to mechanical forces that arise in the cellular microenvironment.
The formation of fog on CR39 surfaces has been studied. Water droplets form fog coalesce with time, especially during the first 20 s at the beginning of the formation of fog. Consequently, their mean diameter increases. Formation of fog being related to the wettability of the surfaces, the latter has been increased by the implantation of Ar ions into CR39 surfaces under an oxygen partial pressure. A very wetting CR39 surface with advancing (ACA) and receding (RCA) contact angles below 5° has been obtained with an implantation dose of 1.28 × 1017 Ar+ cm−2. In this condition, no formation of fog was observed. Characterization using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy has shown that the molecular structure of CR39 is strongly modified by Ar+ implantation, which would be responsible for the increase in wettability. Unfortunately, both ACA and RCA increase with time, which is called ageing, and the formation of fog is again observed. The diameter and concentration of water droplets forming fog have been plotted against the contact angle. These plots show that no formation of fog occurs for ACA < ∼40°. Usually, the ACA reaches 40° after an ageing time of ∼200 h. A He pre-implantation with a dose of 5 × 1015 He+ cm−2 and an energy of 2 keV, sufficient to push the ions deeper than the Ar depth profile, delays the ageing effect in such a way that ACA ≅ 40° is reached after ∼2000 h and no formation of fog is observed during these first ∼2000 h.
The ever-increasing demand for high data storage capacity has spurred research on development of innovative technologies and new storage materials. Conventional GByte optical discs (DVDs and Bluray) can be transformed into ultrahigh capacity storage media by encoding multi-level and multiplexed information within the three dimensional volume of a recording medium. However, in most cases the recording medium had to be photosensitive requiring doping with photochromic molecules or nanoparticles in a multilayer stack or in the bulk material. Here, we show high-density data storage in commonly available plastics without any special material preparation. A pulsed laser was used to record data in micron-sized modified regions. Upon excitation by the read laser, each modified region emits fluorescence whose intensity represents 32 grey levels corresponding to 5 bits. We demonstrate up to 20 layers of embedded data. Adjusting the read laser power and detector sensitivity storage capacities up to 0.2 TBytes can be achieved in a standard 120 mm disc.
We report x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy experiments on a concentrated nanocolloidal gel subject to in situ oscillatory shear strain. The strain causes periodic echoes in the speckle pattern that lead to peaks in the intensity autocorrelation function. Above a threshold strain that is near the first yield point of the gel, the peak amplitude decays exponentially with the number of shear cycles, signaling irreversible particle rearrangements. The wave-vector dependence of the decay rate reveals a power-law distribution in the size of regions undergoing shear-induced rearrangement. The gel also displays strain softening well below the threshold, indicating a range of strains at which the rheology is nonlinear but the microscopic deformations are reversible.
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