Tension-suppressed degradation of collagen controls tissue stiffness scaling with fibrillar collagen

Extremely soft tissues such as developing hearts or adult brain contain far less collagen than highly stiff adult tissues such as tendons, but cell and molecular mechanisms for such homeostatic differences remain unclear. We hypothesized that cell-generated or exogenous forces combine with tension-suppressed collagen degradation in order to sculpt extracellular matrix (ECM) collagen levels in … Read more