ABSTRACT
Mechanical forces, stresses, strains, and velocities play a critical role in many important aspects of cell physiology, such as cell adhesion, motility, and signal transduction. The modeling of cell mechanics is a challenging task because of the interconnection of mechanical, electrical, and biochemical processes; involvement of different structural cellular components; and multiple timescales. It can involve nonlinear mechanics and thermodynamics, and because of its complexity, it is most likely that it will require the use of computational techniques. Typical steps in the development of a cell modeling include constitutive relations describing the state or evolution of the cell or its components, mathematical solution or transformation of the corresponding equations and boundary conditions, and computational implementation of the model.
