Tensegrity structures and data-driven analysis for 3d cell mechanics

Abstract: The cytoskeleton (CSK) plays an important role in many cell functions. Given the similarities between the mechanical behavior of tensegrity structures and the CSK, many studies have proposed different tensegrity-based models for simulating cell mechanics. However, the low symmetry of most tensegrity units has hindered the analysis of realistic 3D structures. As a result, tensegrity-based modeling in cell mechanics has been mainly focused on single cells or monolayers. In this paper, we propose a 3D tensegrity model based on the finite element method for simulating 3D cell mechanics. We show that the proposed model not only captures the nonlinearity of a single cell in an indentation test and a monolayer in stretch test but also the non-uniform stress distribution in multicellular spheroids upon non-uniform prestress design. Furthermore, we introduce a multiscale data-driven framework for cellular mechanics to optimize the computation, thus paving the way for modeling the mechanobiology of large cellular assemblies such as organs.