Force to Fate: Mechanotransduction Across Molecules, Nuclei, and Plants

Mechanotransduction is how cells convert mechanical stimuli — tension, shear, substrate stiffness, viscoelasticity and confinement — into biochemical and transcriptional signals. Once viewed as a specialty of sensory cells, it is now a general principle of cell biology, spanning scales from single-bond lifetimes to tissue remodeling and timescales from millisecond channel gating to durable epigenetic memory. This review organizes the field into five threads: adhesion and cytoskeletal force sensors; mechanosensitive ion channels; the extracellular matrix as an instructor of cell fate; nuclear mechanotransduction and chromatin remodeling; and the engineering of mechanotransduction. A final section highlights plant mechanobiology, where PIEZO channels and the receptor kinase FERONIA reveal distinct architectures relevant to membrane biophysics and biomolecular condensate biology. Throughout, force acts mainly by directly altering molecular conformation; lipids and membranes are active participants; time-dependent matrix properties often outrank static stiffness; and the genome behaves as a mechanically responsive organelle that records a cell’s mechanical history.