This conference will cover the fundamentals, recent advances and emerging issues related to mechanobiology. It will provide a unique opportunity to advance knowledge and understanding in the area of force-sensing in biology. This field intrinsically implies interdisciplinary approaches combining biology with physics, optics and computer modeling. Moreover, mechanobiology is being increasingly appreciated as being of primary importance in a plethora of biological processes, including development and cancer.

How living cells are able to sense their environment and adequately respond in terms of shape, migration, proliferation, differentiation, and survival remains one of the most fascinating issues in cell biology. This is particularly obvious in the context of embryonic development, where the complex architectural multi-scale organization of tissues is elaborated. Conversely, tumor evolution and metastasis is associated to dysfunctions of cell adhesion that frequently lead to the loss of tissue homeostasis. Thus, numerous and various biological processes (e.g. morphogenesis, tissue repair, and cancer invasion) are governed by the response of mechanical signals and their conversion into biochemical ones. Several general features emerge from these descriptions that seem to be of a very universal nature. During this conference, we propose to cover a large spectrum of these aspects. In particular, the conference will provide an overview of the mechanosensitive signaling pathways at the level of single cell and tissues, with a detailed description of the original experimental methods commonly used in this field, as well as including presentation of the necessary theoretical approaches in order to understand and model force generation and propagation in active biological matter.

 

Scientific Organizing Committee

Ada Cavalcanti University of Heidelberg Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Germany	Benoit Ladoux University Paris Diderot, CNRS & Institut Jacques Monod, France Mechanobiology Institute, Singapore
René-Marc Mège University Paris Diderot, CNRS & Institut Jacques Monod, France	Pierre Nassoy Bordeaux University & CNRS France
GV. Shivashankar Mechanobiology Institute, Singapore IFOM, Italy	Yusuke Toyama Mechanobiology Institute Singapore
Jie Yan Mechanobiology Institute Singapore

Invited speakers

Maxime Dahan Physico-Chimie Curie, Institut Curie Paris, France	Dennis E. Discher School of Medicine University of Pennsylvania USA
Suzanne Eaton The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics Dresden, Germany	Taekjip Ha Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, USA
Sally Horne-Badovinac University of Chicago Chicago, USA	Mickael Kozlov Telaviv University Israel
Mian Long Institute of Mechanics Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China	Roberto Mayor Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology University College London, U
Maithreyi Narasimha Department of Biological Sciences Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai, India	Michael P. Sheetz Mechanobiology Intitute, NUS Singapore
Ana Suncana-Smith Institut für Theoretische Physik Universität Nürnberg-Erlangen, Germany	Masatochi Takeichi Riken Center for Developmental Biology Kobe, Japan

Conference venue

The conference will be organized at the International Center for Interdisciplinary Science and Education in Vietnam (ICISE) by Rencontres du Vietnam, a scientific non-profit organization. The venue is located at a beautiful beach in Vietnam, thus allowing participants also to enjoy the nature, culture while having rich scientific discussion. Information can be found here: http://rencontresduvietnam.org/introduction/.

Supporting Institutions

Contact

For questions regarding the scientific program, please contact:

Benoît Ladoux (benoit.ladoux (at) univ-paris-diderot.fr)

René-Marc Mège (Rene-Marc.Mege (at) ijm.fr)

Ada Cavalcanti (ada.cavalcanti-adam (at) urz.uni-heidelberg.de)

Yusuke Toyama (dbsty (at) nus.edu.sg)

For administrative information, please contact:

Aimie Fong (rencontres.vietnam (at) gmail.com)
Secretary of the Rencontres du Vietnam
BP 33, F-91192, Gif sur Yvette, France
Tel: 33 (0)1 69 28 51 35 / 33(0)7 81 29 44 15