Jian Liu
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biophysics
Crawling cells tend to head toward stiffer surroundings, a behavior called durotaxis that shows up in embryo development and in the spread of tumors. Cells feel stiffness at focal adhesions, protein clusters built on integrins, which are the proteins that grip the extracellular matrix outside the cell.
- Fields
Biophysics
Biomedical Engineering
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
durotaxis
cell migration
mechanobiology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Determine how force transmission at a focal adhesion and elongation of its attached stress fiber cross-talk to produce stiffness sensing, by comparing mathematical model predictions with traction measurements.
- Test how stiffness sensing at focal adhesions feeds into protrusion and retraction of the cell edge during migration.
- Model how a cell integrates the mechanosensing output of many focal adhesions, each at a different maturation stage, into net movement toward stiffer extracellular matrix.
More about the research
Through these clusters the cell's actin skeleton tugs on the matrix and registers how much it resists. Experiments describe this process in rich detail, but predictive mathematical models have lagged, so it remains unclear how one adhesion senses stiffness and how a whole cell adds up the signals from many of them.
Why it matters
Cell movement toward stiffer tissue contributes to embryo development and to tumor metastasis, yet its mechanism is poorly defined. A model that predicts rather than merely describes stiffness sensing could help researchers interpret traction and migration measurements, design sharper experiments, and eventually inform work on how tumor cells invade stiffened tissue.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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