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Briefings in Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on June 25, 2007
Briefings in Bioinformatics 2007 8(4):258-265; doi:10.1093/bib/bbm025
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

An integrative approach to understanding mechanosensation

Christopher C. Poirier and Pablo A. Iglesias

Corresponding author. Pablo A. Iglesias, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. Tel: +1 410 516 6026; Fax: +1 410 516 5566; E-mail: pi{at}jhu.edu

The ability for a living organism to sense and respond to its external environment is crucial to its survival. Understanding mechanosensation, the mechanism by which organisms react in response to mechanical stimuli, presents many interesting and challenging problems for both experimental and computational biologists. A major difficulty in studying mechanosensors is their inherent multiscale nature. The systems involved in mechanosesnsing can span eight orders of magnitude in length scale and up to 10 orders of magnitude in time scale. Trying to ascertain information across these length and time scales simultaneously is challenging. This problem has led to the need to approach these types of problems using an integrative approach, combining both computational and experimental biology. This review classifies the major types of mechanosensors and explains methods that have been employed in understanding their behavior, both using modeling and experimental techniques. Multiscale modeling methods combined with experimental techniques in an integrative approach are suggested as ways of undertaking the study of such systems.

Keywords: ion channels, finite element methods, mechanosensation, multiscale modeling

Submitted: March 31, 2007. Received (in revised form): March 31, 2007.


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