Title: Regulation of Tendon Development, Function, and Degeneration by Dynamic Primary Cilia

Speaker: Dr. Fei Fang (Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, NY)

Time:16:00, 26/12/2018(Wednesday)

Place: Room 605, Building 8, Ming Palace Campus

Organizers: State key laboratory of mechanics and control of mechanical structures, College of Aerospace Engineering, Nanjing Center for Multifunctional Lightweight Materials and Structures.

The summary of report：

Rotator cuff repair to recover shoulder function is one of the most common orthopedic surgical procedures. Recreating a mechanically competent attachment (enthesis) between the ruptured tendon and bone is essential to successfully transfer muscle load from tendon to bone and achieve shoulder function. Mechanical forces and hedgehog (Hh) signaling are required for the development and maintenance of the tendon enthesis. Loading deprivation of mouse shoulders during postnatal development causes structural, compositional, and functional defects in the tendon enthesis, including reduced collagen fiber alignment, decreased mineral content, and impaired mechanical function. Loss of Hh signaling or Hh-responsive cells leads to significant deficiencies in enthesis formation. Studies in other connective tissues have shown that both mechanoresponsiveness and Hh signaling are regulated by the primary cilium, an antenna-like nonmotile organelle that projects from the cell’s surface. Therefore, our research focuses on cilium contribution to tendon development and function, and further the crosstalk between cilium-mediated mechanotransduction and Hh signaling. In this talk, I will present the effects of in vivo loading on tendon enthesis cilium assembly and related Hh signaling using transgenic mouse models. We show that manipulation of physiological loading of tendon enthesis regulates primary cilium assembly, indirectly supporting the idea that the primary cilium acts as both a mechanosensor and a Hh signaling hub at the developing tendon enthesis. Our goal is to achieve a better understanding of cilium role during tendon development, and ultimately develop more appropriate therapies for tendon-to-bone repair and tissue engineering.

Speaker Profile：

Dr. Fei Fang holds a doctoral’s degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2017 through Washington University in St. Louis. For her five-year graduate studies, she specialized in the characterization of tendon structure-function-composition relationships, which provides the critical contribution that even minor components of tendon such elastin are essential for the proper function of musculoskeletal tissues. She then started as a postdoctoral fellow at Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Columbia University, under the tutelage of Dr. Stavros Thomopoulos. She has the expertise in both musculoskeletal biology and musculoskeletal biomechanics, including technical expertise in transgenic mouse models, multi-scale biomechanics of soft tissues, 2D and 3D bio-imaging, and lineage tracing tools. Her main research interests are to (1) understand the adaptation of tissue structure-function to altered physiological loading environment during development and maturation; (2) identify the crosstalk between molecular cues and mechanical loading during tissue degeneration and repair. The ultimate aim is to develop therapeutic strategies to promote tissue regeneration through integrating tissue engineering techniques and developmental biology knowledge.