Figure 1.

Mechanical stimuli, e.g., compression, membrane tension, poking, shear stress, stretching, or suction activates calcium influx through mechanosensitive ion channels. Then, calcium acts as a signal molecule on various pathways which may lead to, e.g., cell proliferation [43,44,45,46]. Two models of mechanosensitive ion channel gating have been established. (A) In the force-from-lipids model, alterations in lipid organization lead to channel activation; (B) In the force-from-filaments model, the causative factors are changes in the extracellular matrix and cytoskeleton [31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38].