Topic: mechanical force

Develop high-throughput methods to measure how protein interactions respond to mechanical force. The project combines protein engineering, yeast surface display, directed evolution, deep sequencing and single-molecule force measurements, with machine-learning models trained on the resulting data. Initial applications study interactions involved in blood clotting and von Willebrand disease. This salaried doctoral appointment spans experimental and computational work at ETH Zurich and the University of Basel, with teaching and publication duties.

In this talk, I will describe my lab’s recent efforts to understand the design principles of the active, soft materials that drive cell morphogenesis. In particular, we are interested in how collections of myosin II motors and actin polymers generate, relax, sense and adapt to mechanical force. I will discuss how motor-filament interactions lead to either distributed extensile or contractile stresses as the mechanics of the system changes from fluid to solid. Using optical control of motors, we are now exploring how spatially structured stress can be used to drive local flows and motion. If ti