Force-Carrying Web Pervades Living Cell

“Don't fight forces; use them.” The words of the engineer and architect R. Buckminster Fuller might turn out to be a motto for the living cell. Investigators have traditionally pictured the cell's cytoskeleton of protein fibers as mainly a supporting mechanism. Recent findings, however, have hinted that mechanical forces on the cell can affect everything from the way proteins bind to DNA to whether a malignant cell develops into a full-blown tumor. And now a team of cell biologists–inspired, in part, by Fuller's structural ideas–has demonstrated that mammalian cells are densely “hard-wired” with force-carrying connections that reach all the way from the membrane through the cytoskeleton to the genome.