Photo: Sanni Peltola
In her doctoral dissertation, Heidi Peussa studied how epithelial cells sense and adapt to their surrounding microenvironment, focusing on the unexplored mechanical interactions. She developed three novel techniques to generate distinct mechanical stimuli and applied them to investigate cellular responses to crowding, shear, and substrate deformation at both the population and single-cell levels. Her results show that epithelial tissues are functionally heterogeneous, revealing that morphological remodeling is confined to a limited subpopulation. At the single-cell level, she found that cells are highly sensitive to the temporal dynamics of mechanical cues, responding differently to slow versus rapid deformations in their physical microenvironment. She further demonstrated that the stiffness and viscosity of the cellular microenvironment fine-tune cell behavior by modulating the dynamics of substrate displacement. Together, these findings provide new insights into how the physical niche regulates cellular mechanical signaling. This research is significant, as mechanical signaling is critical for cellular functionality, and its dysregulation can contribute to the onset and progression of a wide range of diseases.
The doctoral dissertation of M.Sc. Heidi Peussa in the field of biosciences titled Mechanosensing at the Cell-ECM Interface in Epithelial Cells will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology at Tampere University on 15 May 2026.
The Opponent will be Associate Professor Kate Poole from the University of New South Wales in Australia. The Custos will be Associate Professor Teemu Ihalainen from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University.