Introduction

Cells, especially in multicellular organisms during development, are subject to a wide range of forces that help shape their overall fate and response to a variety of physiologically important stimuli. During such environmental interactions, it is important that the cell maintains its own “sensory” system, not only with biochemical receptors but also with regard to mechanical signals as well. Mechanotransduction is common in a wide variety of biological and physiological phenomena, from developmental biology to the development of pathophysiological conditions that have wide-ranging health and medical implications. In the case of atherosclerosis, for example, it manifests as a potential progenitor to thrown clots that can cause strokes or myocardial infarctions. In the case of developmental pathways, constructions on the proportions of oocyte and/or egg growth will have adverse consequences for the entire developing organism, should it manage to even continue growing. Several hypotheses have been proposed, as articulated in the individual chapters of this book, for describing the mechanism by which the cell senses mechanical forces and converts them into a cascade of biochemical signals that affect the phenotype of the cell in health and disease. It has also been shown that the deformation of the nucleus is observed in a large variety of important events within the cell such as replication and response to mechanical forces. In this chapter, we focus on the nuclear pore complex (NPC) and examine the role of the NPC and nucleocytoplasmic transport in the regulation and mediation of mechanotransduction.