Gene and tissue atlases provide insights into nuclear mechanics

Mechanical factors are increasingly recognized as an important aspect of cellular behavior and function. Understanding how cells and tissues influence their mechanical environment, and how that environment in turn affects cell behavior and gene expression, is an ongoing field of research.

Public gene databases and tissue atlases can be powerful tools, providing a wealth of information about genes, including their relative levels of expression in different tissues and cells within tissues. However, it can be difficult to infer mechanosensitive behavior directly from gene expression.

Wang et al. reviewed multiple public datasets for information on various mechanosensitive factors, including those of the nuclear lamina that serves to protect a cell’s DNA.

The authors used these large databases to identify co-occurrences of lamin genes with other genes known for their mechanosensitive behavior. These results align well with experiments suggesting A-type lamins are regulated by mechanical factors such as matrix elasticity and cell strain.

“In principle, the approach allows comparisons of gene expression levels between tissues or between cells within tissues,” said author Mai Wang. “Quantitatively analyzing a set of factors in the numerous datasets for anticipated interrelationships can benefit many studies in mechanobiology.”

The group believes their paper will serve as an analysis of the lamina and a guide to performing similar analyses for other mechanosensitive genes. These analyses can then serve as a jumping-off point for experimental studies.

“We hope the tutorial style of the paper will help others to mine atlases and identify tissues and cell types of interest that can be perturbed to further reveal conserved mechanisms and functions in mechanobiology,” said Wang.

Source: “Nuclear mechanoprotection: from tissue atlases as blueprints to distinctive regulation of nuclear lamins,” by Mai Wang, Irena Ivanovska, Manasvita Vashisth, and Dennis E. Discher, APL Bioengineering (2022). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0080392 .

This paper is part of the Mechanobiology of the Cell Nucleus Collection, learn more here .