Electromagnetism of functional biomaterials

Abstract

The multidisciplinary field of electro-mechano-biology (EMB) requires the combined efforts of biologists, material scientists, physicists, and engineers. This is in part due to the great morphological complexity of the cellular system. The emergence of EMB was boosted by numerical simulations, which allow envisioning both fundamental discoveries for cell migration and deformation in microfluidic constrictions over a broad range of time and length scales, and technologies for cancer treatment and drug delivery vehicles. Although a few mechanisms by which cells can be electrodeformed are identified, a few recent papers highlight the potential of multiscale and multiphysics simulations that contain elements of stochasticity in heterogeneous systems to analyze the role of forces and deformation in biological systems. These considerations make an exploration of the theoretical and phenomenological aspects of electromagnetism of functional bionanomaterials a well-motivated direction to pursue. In the EMB of cells and tissues, what matters is the range of characteristic timescales of delayed motion, which limits the applicability of electromagnetic fields. In, we have recently considered the role of these short- and long-term timescales in building spring-dashpot network models of cell architecture to provide a framework for studying the creep and strain relaxation of a single nucleated cell.