BME Seminar: Beth Pruitt
Monday, December 4, 2023 - 12:00 p.m.
Beth Pruitt, Ph.D.
Professor of Bioengineering, Mechanical Engineering and BioMolecular Science and Engineering
University of California Santa Barbara
"Mechanobiology of hiPSC Cardiomyocytes in Health and Disease"
Drachman A114
Zoom link | Password: BearDown
Hosts: Dr. Mario Romero-Ortega and Dr. Shang Song
(Instructor permission required for enrolled students to attend via Zoom)
Persons with a disability may request a reasonable accommodation by contacting the Disability Resource Center at 621-3268 (V/TTY).
Abstract:
Using single cell mechanobiology studies, we examine how disease-linked mutations propagate to change the contractile dynamics and cellular morphology of human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs). We micropattern islands of adhesive protein to constraining the spreading and alignment of hiPSC-CM on hydrogel substrates containing fluorescent microbeads as fiducial markers for traction force microscopy (TFM). We vary substrate stiffnesses from physiological to diseased/fibrotic, apply mechanical stretch, and apply inotropes and myotropes to vary contractile output. We assessed multiple mutations edited into the WTC line along with isogenic controls under stressors. Some cell lines carried an endogenously labeled alpha-actinin GFP reporter for enabling visualization of sarcomere structure and dynamics with force output. These studies suggest changes in contractile force generation driver remodeling of structure and function at a cell-intrinsic level via changes in mechanosignaling.
Bio:
Dr. Beth Pruitt is a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and chair of biological engineering. She was on the faculty at Stanford University from 2003-2018 in mechanical engineering and bioengineering. Dr. Pruitt served as an officer in the US Navy with a first tour at the engineering headquarters of the Navy nuclear programs and a second tour as an instructor teaching systems engineering (and offshore sailing in the summer) at the U.S. Naval Academy. She earned her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Stanford University where she was supported as a Hertz Foundation Fellow. Dr. Pruitt was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), and in 2012, she returned to Switzerland as a visiting professor in the Lab for Applied Mechanobiology in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH, Zurich. She has been recognized by the NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Denice Denton Leadership Award and is a Fellow of the ASME, AIMBE, and BMES.