Overview
- Researchers at King’s College London and IBEC report in Nature Materials that cells measure how long a physical force lasts before acting.
- They identify fibrillar adhesions that grip the surroundings and, through plectin 1f, link to vimentin fibers to deform and anchor the nucleus.
- This arrangement holds the nuclear deformation for about an hour, which creates a short-lived memory of the mechanical signal.
- The hour-long hold acts like a low-pass filter that ignores brief tugs but lets lasting forces activate effectors such as the cancer-linked protein YAP.
- When the adhesion–vimentin link is disrupted, cells react faster with less selectivity, and the team plans to test the timing mechanism in tissues and disease models tied to cancer and fibrosis.