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MIT course 2.797/2.798 (Molecular Cellular and Tissue Biomechanics) teaches students about the role that mechanics plays in biology, with a focus on biomechanics and mechanobiology: “Two words that sound similar, but are actually very different,” says Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Biomechanics, Raman explains, conveys the mechanical properties of biological materials, where mechanobiology teaches students how cells feel and respond to forces in their environment. “When students take this class, they're getting a really unique fusion of not only fundamentals of mechanics, but also emerging research in biomechanics and mechanobiology,” says Raman.
Raman and Peter So, professor of mechanical engineering, co-teach the course, which So says offers a concrete application of some of the basic theory. “We talk about some of the applications and why the fundamental concept is important.”
The pair recently revamped the curriculum to incorporate hands-on lab-learning through the campus BioMakers space and the Safety, Health, Environmental Discovery Lab (SHED) bioprinting makerspace. This updated approach invites students to “build with biology” and see how cells respond to forces in their environment in real time, and it was a change that was seemingly welcomed from the start, with the first offering yielding the course’s largest-ever enrollment.
“Many concepts in biomechanics and mechanobiology can be hard to conceptualize because they happen at length scales that we can't typically visualize,” Raman explains. “In the past, we've done our best to convey these ideas via pictures, videos, and equations. The lab component adds another dimension to our teaching methods. We hope that students seeing firsthand how living cells sense and respond to their environment helps the concepts sink in deeper and last longer in their memories.”
Makerspaces, which are located throughout the campus, offer tools and workspace for MIT community members to invent, prototype, and bring ideas to life. The Institute has over 40 design/build/project spaces that include facilities for 3D printing, glassblowing, wood and metal working, and more. The BioMakers space welcomes students engaged in hands-on bioengineering projects. SHED similarly leverages cutting-edge technologies across disciplines, including a new space focused on 3D bio-printing.
Kamakshi Subramanian, a cross-registered Wellesley College student, says she encountered a polymer model in a prior thermodynamics class, but wondered how she’d apply it. Taking this course gave her a new frame of reference. “I was like, ‘Why are we doing this?’ … and then I came here and I was like, ‘OK, thinking about entropy in this way is actually useful.’”
Raman says there’s a special kind of energy and excitement associated with being in a lab versus staying in the classroom. “It reminds me of going on a field trip when I was in elementary school,” she says, adding that seeing that energy in students during the course’s first run inspired the instructors to expand lab offerings even further in the second offering.
“[In addition to] one main lab on the biomechanics of muscle contraction, we have added a second lab where students visit the SHED makerspace to learn about 3D bio-printing,” she says. “We have also incorporated an optional hands-on component into the final project, [and] most students in the class are taking advantage of this extra lab time to try exciting curiosity-driven experiments at the intersection of biology and mechanics.”
Raman and So, who were joined in teaching the second iteration of the course this semester by professor of biological engineering Mark Bathe, say they hope to continue to build the amount of hands-on time incorporated into the class in the coming years.
Ayi Agboglo, a Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology graduate student who is studying the physical properties of red blood cells relevant to sickle cell disease (SCD), says taking the course introduced him to studies where mathematical models extracted mechanical properties of red blood cell (RBC) membranes in the context of SCD.
“In SCD, deoxygenation causes rigid protein fibers to form within cells, altering their mechanical and physical properties,” he explains. “This field of work has largely informed my research which focuses on measuring the physical properties of RBCs (mass, volume, and density) in both oxygenated and deoxygenated states. These measurements aim to reveal patient-specific differences in fiber formation — the primary pathological event in SCD — potentially uncovering new therapeutic opportunities.”
Agboglo, who works in Professor Cullen Buie’s lab at MIT and John Higgins’ lab at MGH, says, “I left [the class] not only understanding more about molecular mechanics, but also understanding just fundamentals about thermodynamics and energy and things that I think will be useful as a scientist in general.”
In addition to lab and lecture time, 2.797/2.798 students also had the opportunity to work with the Museum of Science, Boston and generate open-source educational resources about the interplay between mechanics and biology. These resources are now available on the museum's website.
