Micropatterning: Tomography and Static‐Mechanical Properties of Adherent Cells (Adv. Mater. 42/2012)

A tomography approach is used to reconstruct 3D cell shapes and the shapes/positions of the nuclei within these cells simultaneously. Bartosz A. Grzybowski, Kristiana Kandere-Grzybowska and co-workers show on page 5719 that cells subjected to well-defined microconfinements of various diameters allow for relating the steady-state shapes of cells to their staticmechanical properties. The observed shapes show striking regularities between different cell types and all fit to a model that takes into account the cell membrane, cortical actin, and the nucleus.