I am happy to share our recent paper published in Cell Reports Physical Science: Inhomogeneous substrate strain-driven long-range cellular patterning
In this paper, using experiments and Finite Element simulations, we report our discovery that biological cells can sense pre-existing strain/strain-gradient fields on their substrates, and, in response, form long range (20-40 cell lengths) aligned patterns. The findings reported can have important implications for understanding tissue/organism development and cancer metastasis.