Tensegrità e transduzione meccano-chimica: un modello di regolazione del network umano in ambito PNEI

Tensegrità e transduzione meccano-chimica: un modello di regolazione del network umano in ambito PNEI

Nicola Barsotti – Osteopata D.O. M.R.O.I., fisioterapista, Socio SIPNEI, membro della commissione per lo studio delle terapie corporee della SIPNEI.

The article examines the development of a new branch of biology: cell mechanics, mechanobiology and tensegrity model. This new area of research allows us to interpret in a new light the study of posture.
Mechanobiology studies the role of mechanical forces for the functionality of many basic processes of the cell. The malfunction of this processes can be implicated in various disorders and diseases such as cancer, osteoporosis, atherosclerosis, etc… The understanding of cellular mechanics seems to be the great challenge of this century. Many fascinating problems in biology could not be studied without a simultaneous deep and rigorous study of the chemical and mechanical process-
es. The cell is in fact, globally, partly solid and partly liquid (viscoelastic). In addition, the properties of cellular components change according to the frequency of the application of forces (Jacobs, Huang, Kwon 2013).
The most important model of mechanobiology applied to the cell is known as Tensegrity (tensional integrity). This world in biology was introduced in 1993 by Donald Ingber, professor at the Harvard University, in an article published on Science (Ingber 1993) in which he explains the architecture of life.
This new vision allows us to interpret the body and the posture in an integrated and complex view. Indeed, there is a hierarchical system from the intracellular level to the organism in its entirety.

Wherever mobility is transmitted to the entire system and the energy is stored and released by distortion and standardization of the shape of the system itself. The structure, then, is functionally integrated in a continuous state of pre-tension, prepared at any time to move, protect, control, mobilize, stabilize. It follows that the human body is composed of a single continuum, the living matrix, in which there is a nuclear matrix, within a cellular matrix, within a connective matrix (Ingber 2006).

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