12 research
One cancer line Sun and his team studies is MDA-MB231 (shown above), a metastatic breast cancer cell that is highly aggressive with limited treatment options for patients.
Fueling Cell Movement Cars require fuel, or energy, to move and get people from one destination to another. How much fuel the car will need though depends on many factors. Cars consume fuel based on their engine and body design, but the environment outside of the car also influences fuel consumption, like terrain, wind, temperature, and road conditions. Like cars, cells need to metabolize energy to move. How a cell metabolizes its fuel, adenosine triphosphate, is determined by environmental factors outside of the cell. But how much energy a cell consumes to generate movement has never been studied in detail because measuring the metabolic activity of a single cell is extremely difficult.
“Nobody buys a car by just looking under the hood—you buy it by the overall specs of the car like size, mpg (miles per gallon), etc. And when we look around there is very little measurement of performance factors like mpg for cells,” said Sean Sun, INBT core faculty member and professor of mechanical engineering. While cells are not mechanical machines, they share similar characteristics and can exhibit machine-like behavior. Knowing what a cell needs to generate forces and perform mechanical functions can help researchers understand cell movement. “A lot of biological research is like taking a car apart, naming the parts, and deciphering what each part does,” said Sun. So rather than study
