{"doi":"10.1002/advs.202306210","title":"Mechanical Intercellular Communication via Matrix‐Borne Cell Force Transmission During Vascular Network Formation","abstract":"Intercellular communication is critical to the formation and homeostatic function of all tissues. Previous work has shown that cells can communicate mechanically via the transmission of cell-generated forces through their surrounding extracellular matrix, but this process is not well understood. Here, mechanically defined, synthetic electrospun fibrous matrices are utilized in conjunction with a microfabrication-based cell patterning approach to examine mechanical intercellular communication (MIC) between endothelial cells (ECs) during their assembly into interconnected multicellular networks. It is found that cell force-mediated matrix displacements in deformable fibrous matrices underly directional extension and migration of neighboring ECs toward each other prior to the formation of stable cell-cell connections enriched with vascular endothelial cadherin (VE-cadherin). A critical role is also identified for calcium signaling mediated by focal adhesion kinase and mechanosensitive ion channels in MIC that extends to multicellular assembly of 3D vessel-like networks when ECs are embedded within fibrin hydrogels. These results illustrate a role for cell-generated forces and ECM mechanical properties in multicellular assembly of capillary-like EC networks and motivates the design of biomaterials that promote MIC for vascular tissue engineering.","journal":"Advanced Science","year":2023,"id":328494,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":23,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9516,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":397306,"name":"Firaol S. Midekssa","orcid":"0009-0007-2260-1690","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":345298,"name":"Samuel J. DePalma","orcid":"0000-0001-6708-5019","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":811967,"name":"Jordan L. Kamen","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":345300,"name":"William Y. Wang","orcid":"0000-0001-9669-4841","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":346586,"name":"Danica Kristen P. Jayco","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1050419,"name":"Megan E. Wieger","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":277953,"name":"Brendon M. Baker","orcid":"0000-0002-2785-1070","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":277947,"name":"Christopher D. Davidson","orcid":"0000-0003-0504-0215","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":82,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:08:52.196069Z","pmid":"37997199","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}