Carina Dunlop visited Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton on Tuesday 9 January to give a seminar in the Applied Mathematics Series.  Her talk was on “Mechanical models for cell and tissue culture exploring mechanotransduction“.  An abstract of the talk follows: the ability of cells to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environments is fundamental to a range of cellular behaviours, with stiffness increasingly being found to be a key control parameter. The physical mechanisms underpinning mechanosensing are, however, not well understood. In her talk she considered the key physical cellular behaviours of active contractility of the internal cytoskeleton and cell growth, coupling these into mechanical models for tissue culture. These models suggest new distinct mechanisms of mechanotransduction in cell and tissue culture.