Sam Aytekin

Mark your calendars! Mechanobiology event of the year is around the corner. Can’t wait to return to beautiful Barcelona and reconnect with my old colleagues from IBEC.

Mechanochemical waves in focal adhesions during cell migration Traction force and FAK signaling exhibit oscillatory temporal coupling in adhesive structures.

Garcia Lab did it again! Such a fantastic read if you are interested in FAs mechanics and biology. Congratulations to @garcialabgt.bsky.social

Still buzzing after the @cellmech2025.bsky.social conference in Leuven!
It was great to connect with so many experts in mechanobiology and to be part of this close, dynamic community. We enjoyed the inspiring talks and left with plenty of new ideas.💡
Already looking forward to the next edition!

Interested in how cells respond when squeezed? Check the review paper just published by Laura Faure, @valeriaventurini.bsky.social and myself on this. Really thorough and clear revision by Laura and Valeria!

Always an honor to hear @johannaivaska.bsky.social share her insights, this time on how composite ECM components influence cell behavior, and how fibronectin-dense regions affect (or not) YAP/Oct-1 localization. An inspiring talk from an inspiring scientist. @cellmech2025.bsky.social.

Great experience presenting my work at @cellmech2025.bsky.social, where I shared how TFM and FRET sensors reveal the relationship between cellular tractions and focal adhesion tension. Sacrificed the food and drinks, but the (rather intense) discussions made up for it 💪🏻

Exciting week ahead! @cellmech2025.bsky.social is looking truly incredible and we are happy to be here as @rochalab.bsky.social. Let’s share some quality science! 🔬

Mechano-osmotic signals control chromatin state and fate transitions in pluripotent stem cells - Nature Cell Biology McCreery, Stubb et al. show that mechano-osmotic changes in the nucleus induce general transcriptional repression and prime chromatin for cell fate transitions by relieving repression of specific differentiation genes.

How do #stemcells integrate information to coordinate fate decisions? Delighted to finally see our work showing how growth factors regulate the mechano-osmotic state of the #nucleus and #chromatin to control #pluripotency exit out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... see 🧵 👇

Very happy to see our preprint on how the mechanosensitive ion channel Piezo1 controls intercellular junction maturation by balancing cortex and membrane tension now published in @jcellsci.bsky.social Congratulations to Ahsan & team! journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

Huge respect for this technically wild study from the Oakes lab👏
Combining laser ablation, TFM, vinculin tension probes, optogenetics and FRAP, they show that the recruitment of zyxin & paxillin, but not of vinculin and its tension, correlate with local tension changes. Interesting and challenging!

How to turn a layer of fibroblasts into a tulip 🌷?

Check out our new pre-print on shape-programmable living surfaces.

Led by @pauguillamat.bsky.social‬

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks Isaac, it’s very nice of you! It’s almost there :))

Congratulations! Such a clever and simple approach. Would definitely like to give it a try!

One major drawback of DNA force sensors is their super short lifetime—making them rather unsuitable for most bio studies. Huge congrats (and thanks) to isaacli.bsky.social’s team for solving one more problem for the field! Looks like it’s time to image some integrin forces 😎

Super-resolution imaging in whole cells and tissues via DNA-PAINT on a spinning disk confocal with optical photon reassignment - Nature Communications Zaza and colleagues demonstrate that DNA-PAINT on a spinning disk confocal microscope with optical photon reassignment enables high-resolution imaging across large fields and imaging depths, resolving...

Can we break past the usual limits of #SuperResolution #Microscopy—achieving deep-imaging, high-res, large FOV imaging without the trade-offs?
🧬🔬 YES: with #DNA_PAINT + Spinning Disk Confocal + Optical Photon Reassignment (#SDC-OPR)!
📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natcomms.nature.com!
🧵👇

Fibrous polyisocyanide hydrogels for 3D cell culture applications - Nature Protocols Methods to use polyisocyanide as a model matrix for 3D cell culture. Polyisocyanide gels closely mimic the physical properties of biogels such as collagen and fibrin and, as fully synthetic materials,...

Hydrogels are essential in mechanobiology—and PIC is a game changer.
Fully synthetic yet highly biomimetic, PIC opens new possibilities for 3D cell culture applications.
Congrats to Hongbo Yuan, Kouwer Lab, and rochalab.bsky.social on this detailed Nature Protocols guide! 👏📜

Me: I see lines in my 🔬 confocal images! 💊 Doctor: please read this paper! doi.org/10.1016/j.bb...

This months #GRC on Fibronectin, Integrins and Related Molecules 🔬was a reminder of how powerful in-person science can be. Lots of unpublished research, discussions and brainstorming; making friends and making collaborators too. GRC is a unique experience and I’m still processing it all!

2nd International Conference Focused on Cell Adhesion - ADHERE 2 Fourwaves - 2nd International Conference Focused on Cell Adhesion - ADHERE 2

Registration is now open, come join us in beautiful Zadar (Croatia) in September for Adhere2. event.fourwaves.com/adhere2/pages

The GRC on Fibronectin, Integrins and Related Molecules earlier this month was a fantastic meeting.

Good work @tanentzapflab.bsky.social and @sarawickstrom.bsky.social for organising.

www.grc.org/fibronectin-...

Finnish Science Award to Professor Johanna Ivaska The Finnish Science Award 2025 has been awarded to Johanna Ivaska, Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at the University of Turku.

Such a well deserved award. Congratulations to @johannaivaska.bsky.social and her fantastic team 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Very important publication highlighting the need for more realistic cell culture disease models that recapitulate better (patho)physiological conditions.

Adhesion-derived condensates control component availability to regulate adhesion dynamics Integrin adhesion complexes mediate cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) interactions and undergo dynamic remodelling to regulate cell adhesion and migration. Here, we demonstrate that tensin 1 (TNS1), a m...

Happy to share our Tensin 1 phase separation project is now on bioRxiv.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This wouldn't be possible without
@johannaivaska.bsky.social
@ivaskalab.bsky.social
#VattulainenLab
#MSCA by @ec.europa.eu
@turkubioscience.bsky.social
@inflames-flagship.bsky.social

What a view for science! ☀️⛰️
#GRC on #Fibronectin, #Integrins and Related Molecules is going strong in Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco with a beautiful backdrop. I am happy to share my work on focal adhesion mechanics in my first-time Gordon conference with the brightest minds in the field. 🔬

Linking Molecular Tension and Cellular Tractions: A Multiscale Approach to Focal Adhesion Mechanics Focal adhesions (FAs) are mechanosensitive structures that mediate force transmission between cells and the extracellular matrix. While Traction Force Microscopy (TFM) quantifies cellular tractions ex...

We did it!
🧪 After years of fiddling with gels, lasers, cells, and infinite lines of custom codes, our first preprint is out!
We integrated TFM & FRET-based tension probes into one workflow to zoom in on focal adhesions mechanics 🔬
Already 400 downloads and I’m only mildly panicking 😅

🌞 Today, the old Cloth Hall is the university’s policy center.
☕ Inside you can visit a tiny museum, a university shop and a coffee bar.

It is still the central place of enrollment, and one of its halls is still regularly used for public PhD defenses and amazing conferences like CELLMECH!!

(5/5)

@oozguc.bsky.social has many talents—science, art, and making the rest of us jealous, just to name a few. That Cell-estial Bloom image is simply stunning. Truly congratulations!

DNA-PAINT based tension probes (while being extremely challenging) has seen remarkable advances in the last decade, with the latest being the qtPAINT, allowing force quantification at super-resolution! Check out the new publication from Li Lab @UBC. Congratulations!

What an incredible line-up of speakers! Can't be more excited to finally be a part of GRC on Fibronectin, Integrins and Related Molecules.
Just two more days to go!

Why do the same nanoparticles behave differently across tumors?
The latest study from @rochalab.bsky.social reveals the tumor-biology and the proteomic profiles alter NP uptake and diffusion—changing the standard pipeline in cancer nanomedicine.
Congratulations to my colleagues and lunch-mates! 👏