Examining the role of cell-cell communication in spatiotemporal YAP translocation

• Shannon Rosen, Biomedical Engineering, University of Delaware

• Elise Corbin, Biomedical Engineering, University of Delaware

Cells are known to feel and respond to their microenvironment. There have been many studies where stiffness-driven changes on the cellular responses have been studied but in our study, we want to understand how localized mechanical stimulations affect the cellular responses of an entire cell network. To examine this we are focusing on the Yes-associated protein (YAP) as our biomarker; prior research has shown that YAP translocates from the cytoplasm into the nucleus at a higher rate on stiffer substrates. This led us to explore how YAP translocation is affected by Cell-ECM and Cell-Cell communication when only a portion of the substrate is stiffened. We used an in-vitro culture platform to locally stiffen the substrate which is made of magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) and that allowed us to tune the substrate stiffness locally with an applied magnetic field. The prior research based on this local stiffening showed that there was higher YAP translocation to the nucleus at the locally stiffened area and was found to be propagated from the point of origin within the cell network. We wanted to decouple the effects of Cell-Cell and Cell-ECM by inhibiting Cell-Cell communication. Therefore, in our experiment, we inhibited Cell-Cell communication in conjunction with localized stiffening, in order to investigate the effect Cell-Cell communication has on the propagation of biomarkers in a cellular network.