Electronics meet biology to better measure cellular contraction

Instantaneous monitoring of processes happening inside cells can be challenging. Cellular contraction, for example, plays a role in various processes in the human body, including those related to disease and development. While some techniques have been developed to measure cell contractility, measuring these processes in real time or in the body is difficult.

Alexander Boys and Róisín Owens discuss how the emerging field of bioelectronics, which applies electronics to biology, could address remaining challenges to monitoring cell contraction.

The authors reviewed existing techniques for monitoring cell contractions and their limitations, as well as how bioelectronics could help. New bioelectronic devices could potentially take measurements with high spatiotemporal resolution to measure cell contraction as it occurs in a living organism, allowing researchers to learn more about this process and advance mechanobiology.

They hope their review will encourage researchers outside the field to consider getting involved in bioelectronics.

“We wrote this review to motivate people to get into bioelectronics from an adjacent set of interests,” said Boys. “Meeting these more traditional engineering fields, like electrical engineering and mechanics, with biology has traditionally been somewhat difficult. We wrote this review with the idea of getting people in these other fields to think more about this idea. Hopefully, we can get more people in bioelectronics.”

The authors believe bioelectronics could eventually produce live sensors capable of measuring cell contractility as cells propagate and in 3D.

Boys said bioelectronics may be able to look at cell contraction in developing embryos, because these devices have a history of implantation in the human body, such as pacemakers and cochlear implants.

Source: “Measuring cellular contraction: Current progress and a future in bioelectronics,” by Alexander J. Boys and Róisín M. Owens, APL Materials (2021). The article can be accessed at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0040953 .