9 research outputs found
Integrin activation - the importance of a positive feedback
Integrins mediate cell adhesion and are essential receptors for the
development and functioning of multicellular organisms. Integrin activation is
known to require both ligand and talin binding and to correlate with cluster
formation but the activation mechanism and precise roles of these processes are
not yet resolved. Here mathematical modeling, with known experimental
parameters, is used to show that the binding of a stabilizing factor, such as
talin, is alone insufficient to enable ligand-dependent integrin activation for
all observed conditions; an additional positive feedback is required.Comment: in press in Bulletin of Mathematical Biolog
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Sensing specific molecular interactions with the atomic force microscope
One of the unique features of the atomic force microscope (AFM) is its capacity to measure interactions between tip and sample with high sensitivity and unparalleled spatial resolution. Since the development of methods for the functionalization of the tips, the versatility of the AFM has been expanded to experiments where specific molecular interactions are measured. For illustration, we present measurements of the interaction between complementary strands of DNA. A necessary prerequisite for the quantitative analysis of the interaction force is knowledge of the spring constant of the cantilevers. Here, we compare different techniques that allow for the in situ measurement of the absolute value of the spring constant of cantilevers