Georg August Universität Göttingen Drittes Physikalisches Institut

We study how mechanics is involved and sometimes even responsible for the correct and robust interaction between the different biological components. Although cell and tissue mechanics has been a research focus during the past two decades, we only start to scratch the surface of all the intriguingly complex dependencies between biochemical signaling, mechanical forces and viscoelastic properties. The quantitative description and the mathematical modelling of the complex interaction inside cells and tissue are the focus of the lab. Therefore we develop new measurement methods to quantify forces and tension in 3D tissue, membranes and filaments. Furthermore, we investigate new microscopy and analysis methods and integrate these with quantitative measurements of the viscoelastic properties in cells can tissue.