Welcome to the website of the Vorselen Lab of Mechanobiology and quantitative immune cell biology!
What we do
In the Vorselen Lab, we are fascinated by mechanical regulation of cell functions, specifically in our immune system, where immune cells use forces to guide target selection and enhance target killing. Indeed, physical forces have emerged as critical regulators of cell function over the past two decades. We focus on immune cell-target interactions, including phagocytosis and cytolytic synapse formation, which require rapid and large changes in cellular organization, are adaptable to targets yet robust, and are critical for human health.
We develop new biophysical technologies to tune the physical stimuli that cells receive and assess the forces they generate. We combine these techniques with quantitative microscopy and advanced cellular perturbations to interrogate complex cellular dynamics. Together, this provides an unusual quantitative readout of immune cell behavior and helps us understand the regulation of immune processes by physical forces in health and disease.
A special focus of our lab is phagocytosis by macrophages. This process is intriguing from a fundamental mechanobiology perspective: Although it is established that phagocytosis is generally more efficient for stiffer prey, how phagocytes sense and adapt to prey of varying rigidity remains almost entirely unknown. The force-generating machinery in phagocytosis is common to many other cellular processes, and understanding the physical principles underlying phagocytosis may give general insight into immune cell dynamics. Studying the mechanobiology of phagocytosis is equally important from a clinical perspective. Cancer cells, for example, may evade immune recognition through their “softness”. Revealing the target-specific mechanisms and regulators of phagocytosis may further facilitate the design of novel precision therapeutics aimed at macrophages.
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