Preface
A couple of decades ago, when I first heard the term mechanobiology, I thought it
was just a fancy and more modern name for biomechanics. While there certainly
is overlap between these disciplines, I eventually came to realize that there also are
important differences. Today, mechanobiology has become an exciting and rapidly
expanding field that attracts considerable interest from students and researchers in
engineering, physics, and biology.
The differences between the two fields are rooted in their origins. Whereas
biomechanics began largely as an attempt to understand the mechanical function
and dysfunction of biological systems, mechanobiology emerged from studies of
how cells and tissues respond to mechanical stimuli. One goal of mechanobiology
is to understand how cells and tissues maintain and restore normal function. In this
way, mechanobiology can be considered a natural extension of biomechanics.
Problems in mechanobiology typically require a greater knowledge of biology
than many problems in biomechanics. For this reason, mechanobiology has become
a popular subject among biomedical engineering students, who generally take more
biology courses than students in other engineering majors. Unfortunately, many
of these students take relatively few, if any, courses in engineering mechanics.
(Currently, only one course in engineering mechanics is required of undergraduates
in biomedical engineering at Washington University.) As the field of mechanobiology matures, problems increasingly demand more sophisticated mechanics and
computational models. Although gaining the necessary expertise can be quite
challenging for those with little prior background in the subject, I have found that
dedicated students can become reasonably proficient in mechanics, even nonlinear
mechanics. This book is written with those students in mind.
The main objective of this book is to present theoretical approaches that can
be used to model problems in mechanobiology. The theories are based on the
fundamental principles of continuum mechanics, which treats matter as a continuous
medium rather than discrete particles. When used to model tissues, continuum
models effectively ignore the behavior of individual cells. When used to model
cells, they ignore the behavior of cytoskeletal components. And when used to
model cytoskeletal structures, continuum models ignore the behavior of individual
vii
A couple of decades ago, when I first heard the term mechanobiology, I thought it
was just a fancy and more modern name for biomechanics. While there certainly
is overlap between these disciplines, I eventually came to realize that there also are
important differences. Today, mechanobiology has become an exciting and rapidly
expanding field that attracts considerable interest from students and researchers in
engineering, physics, and biology.
The differences between the two fields are rooted in their origins. Whereas
biomechanics began largely as an attempt to understand the mechanical function
and dysfunction of biological systems, mechanobiology emerged from studies of
how cells and tissues respond to mechanical stimuli. One goal of mechanobiology
is to understand how cells and tissues maintain and restore normal function. In this
way, mechanobiology can be considered a natural extension of biomechanics.
Problems in mechanobiology typically require a greater knowledge of biology
than many problems in biomechanics. For this reason, mechanobiology has become
a popular subject among biomedical engineering students, who generally take more
biology courses than students in other engineering majors. Unfortunately, many
of these students take relatively few, if any, courses in engineering mechanics.
(Currently, only one course in engineering mechanics is required of undergraduates
in biomedical engineering at Washington University.) As the field of mechanobiology matures, problems increasingly demand more sophisticated mechanics and
computational models. Although gaining the necessary expertise can be quite
challenging for those with little prior background in the subject, I have found that
dedicated students can become reasonably proficient in mechanics, even nonlinear
mechanics. This book is written with those students in mind.
The main objective of this book is to present theoretical approaches that can
be used to model problems in mechanobiology. The theories are based on the
fundamental principles of continuum mechanics, which treats matter as a continuous
medium rather than discrete particles. When used to model tissues, continuum
models effectively ignore the behavior of individual cells. When used to model
cells, they ignore the behavior of cytoskeletal components. And when used to
model cytoskeletal structures, continuum models ignore the behavior of individual
vii