ABSTRACT
As the frontier of biomechanics research, cellular and molecular biomechanics is an interdisciplinary research field at the cutting edge of applied mechanics and life science and biology, which brings us many challenging problems to the current theories and techniques in biomechanics due to its importance and complexity. This paper will give a brief review on several of these challenging problems and make some comments on the papers included in this special issue, such as the mechanical properties and modeling methods of cell, the modeling of mechanochemical couplig and multiscale modeling methods in cell mechanics, so as to stimulate the common interest within not only the biomechanics but also the applied mechanics community.
ABSTRACT
As a rapidly developing area in biomechanics, mechanics of biological materials aims to investigate the fundamental relationship between functions, properties, structures, and compositions of various natural biological materials at different length scales and the underlying physical mechanisms through experimental research and theoretical analysis, and to provide inspirations from the splendid living world for the biomimetic design of new materials. In this paper, some recent achievements, mainly made by Chinese scholars in this field, are briefly reviewed, including the stiffening and toughening mechanisms of such biological composites as nacres and horns, the relation between the surface wetting behavior and the micro/nanostructures, and some relevant biomimetic applications as well. The contents of seven invited papers published in this special issue are also introduced.