Rising Star Faculty – Dr. Karl J. Lewis

Investigation of cholinergic signaling in acute bone mechanotransduction mechanisms

ABSTRACT:

Osteocytes (OTs) are the resident bone mechanosensor responsible for differentiating mechanical loading characteristics and turning them into appropriately tuned biological responses. They use calcium (Ca²⁺) signaling to encode strain magnitude and frequency (Lewis, PNAS 2017), however the details regarding Ca²⁺ machinery constituent roles in osteocyte Ca²⁺ signaling events is not well understood. This presentation will cover intravital imaging studies aimed at interrogating the way osteocytes encode mechanical input via Ca2+ signaling and how these patterns change as a function of disease and genetic modification of candidate mechanotransduction constituent factors. Ca2+ signaling from in vivo measurements provide a tool for understanding how mechanobiological mechanisms impact bone metabolism, and the potential for understanding mechanotransduction and acute disease in other musculoskeletal tissues in the future.

NARRATIVE BIOSKETCH:

Dr. Karl Lewis is an assistant professor at the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University. Dr. Lewis’s research interests center on understanding the interplay of mechanical cues and biological changes in musculoskeletal tissues. His group develops novel intravital imaging techniques for studying mechanotransduction and mechanobiology in vivo. They interrogate how acute sensing mechanisms in musculoskeletal cells relate to tissue-level changes in healthy and disease states, with the objective to use this knowledge to identify new targets for therapeutic intervention in musculoskeletal disease. Moreover, the Lewis Lab is dedicated to expanding analysis techniques for histological and live imaging data.