NANOBIOMECHANICS

Computer Engineering electronics Engineering Civil Engineering

Nanobiomechanics (also bionanomechanics) is an merging field in nanoscience and biomechanics that combines the powerful tools of nanomechanics to explore fundamental science of biomaterials and biomechanics. Since the introduction by its founder Prof. Y. C. Fung, the field of biomechanics has established as one of the branches of mechanics and bioscience. For many years, biomechanics was focused on tissue level. Through advancements in nanoscience, the scale of the forces that could be measured and also the scale of observation of biomaterials was reduced to "nano" and "pico" level. Consequenctly it became possible to measure examine the mechanical properties of biological materials at nanoscale. Most of the biological materials have different hierarchical level, and the smallest ones usually fall in the nanoscale. For example bone has up to seven level of hierarchy, and the smallest level, i.e., single collagen fibril and hydroxylapatite minerals have dimensions well below 100 nm. Therefore, being able to probe properties at this small scales provide a great opportunity for a better understanding of the fundamental properties of these materials. For example measurements has shown that there exits nanomechanical heterogeneity even within a single collagen fibrils as small as 100 nm. One of the other most relevant topics in this field is measurement of tiny forces on living cells to recognize changes caused by different diseases. For example, it has been shown that red blood cells infected by malaria are 10 times stiffer than normal cells. Likewise, it has been shown that cancer cells are 70 percent softer than normal cells. Early signs of aging cartilage and Osteoarthritis has been shown by looking at the changes in the tissue at the nanoscale. loading..