Wontae, Nik, and Stephanie publish their outstanding efforts over the last several years in Nature Communications! Cells actively push and pull when they’re inside 3D tissues to ‘sculpt’ tissues from within. Here, our team engineered microscale hydrogel sensors to “see” the forces that a cell is feeling inside tissues. With our collaborators at McGill, the Goodman Cancer Research Center, Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan, and SUNY-Buffalo, we figured out how these forces contribute to tissue structure and function. Just like your skin keeps your insides in, cells that are on the outside of tissues spontaneously pull to form a ‘skin’ of highly contractile cells that squeeze the tissue to create highly compressed core. Check out the full paper at Nature Communications or on our publications page. Talk about starting off strong with our New Year’s resolutions!

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