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. 2023 May 2;12(1):23. doi: 10.1038/s41389-023-00467-1

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 3 — A Schematic of the elastic micropillar array setup to quantify cellular traction forces. B Heat map of the traction force distribution in control and RAR-β agonist-treated Suit2 cells. The cell body is outlined in blue. Scale bar: 10 µm. C Quantification of mean maximum traction force exerted by Suit2 cells on elastic pillars for Control, RAR-β agonist, RAR-β siRNA (siRARB), RAR-β agonist + siRARB, and RAR-β agonist + MLC-2 overexpression (OE MLC-2). Mean ± s.e.m., n = 70, 53, 97, 110 and 87 cells, respectively. P-values indicate difference relative to RAR-β agonist-treated cells by Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn’s post-hoc test. D Schematic of the AFM nanoindentation method to measure cell stiffness. E Cytoskeletal stiffness measured with AFM using a 15 μm bead and fitted to the Hertz model for control, RAR-β agonist, RAR-β siRNA (siRARB), RAR-β agonist + siRARB, and RAR-β agonist + MLC-2 overexpression (OE MLC-2). Mean ± s.e.m., n = 91, 58, 58, 56 and 64 cells, respectively. P-values indicate difference relative to RAR-β agonist-treated cells by Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn’s post-hoc test, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. F Schematic representation of the magnetic tweezers protocol used to measure mechanosensing in pancreatic cancer cells with the blue arrow indicating the magnetic pull applied to a fibronectin-coated bead on the cell surface. G Representative bead trajectories under the pulsatile force regime (12 force pulses) in control and RAR-β agonist-treated cells. A decrease in the displacement amplitude over the 12 pulses can be observed in control cells but not in RAR-β agonist-treated cells. H Relative bead displacement for the 1st and 12th pulses for control, RAR-β agonist, RAR-β siRNA (siRARB), RAR-β agonist + siRARB, and RAR-β agonist + MLC-2 overexpression (OE MLC-2). A significant difference between the amplitude of the 1st pulse and the 12th pulse is an indicator of mechanosensing as the cell reinforces in response to the applied force. Mean ± s.e.m., n = 41, 22, 28, 30 and 21 cells, respectively. Wilcoxon signed-rank test.