LAUSR

The articles are written by a collection of physicists and engineers working at the biophysics/medical engineering interface. They cover the full armamentarium ofmicron to nanometer scale engineering, manipulation and observation methodologies (including the most modern microscopy, spectroscopy and nanoscopy techniques), this Special Issue arguably constitutes one of the most fundamental representations of classical physical principles applied to cell and tissue behavior published in the journal to date. I would like to congratulate the Special Issue Editors Massimo Vassalli, Marco Capitanio, Aldo Ferrari, and Boris Martinac for the interesting array of Review articles they have commissioned and for their collective efforts in keeping the Issue on schedule. A summary of the individual Reviews included within this Special Issue is provided within the main Editorial (Ferrari et al. 2019) and I refer the interested reader there for a useful precis of contents. To provide some additional perspective on the mechanobiology field, the Special Issue Editors have commissioned a number of topical Commentaries. First amongst these is a brief look into the possible future of mechanobiology research written by a senior researcher in the field, Prof. Jochen Guck of the Max Planck Center for Physics of light (Guck 2019). Following this is a Commentary from the President of the European Society of Biomechanics (Prof. MaAngeles Peréz Anson) who has written about the work of that Society to facilitate mechanobiology research from the microscopic to macroscopic level (Pérez 2019). Next we hear from a young researcher (Assist. Prof. Robert Steward Jr.) just setting up a laboratory in the mechanobiology field (Steward 2019). Rounding out these commentaries is a piece written by the Director (Prof. Peter Kohl) and Senior Staff (Dr. Julia Verheyen and Dr. Remi Peyronnet) of the Institut für Experimentelle Kardiovaskuläre Medizin (IEKM) who provide an inside perspective on the establishment and maintenance of a dedicated Mechanobiology Institute comprising over fifty academic staff and students (Verheyen et al. 2019).