Special issue on "Biofluid mechanics of multitude pathways: From cellular to organ"

While for decades a major focus of the community is arguably the cardiovascular system, biofluid mechanics presently plays a major role in mechanotransduction, system biology, urinary, musculoskeletal, neurological, ocular, lymphatic, and auditory systems, as well as in reproduction biomechanics, developmental biology, embryogenesis, and in synthetic biology applications. Given the multitude of pathways underlying complex physiological process, and with the growing recognition of the multitude of mechanotransduction pathways that are flow driven and involve chemical and electrical signaling, it is clear that biofluid mechanics practitioners need to adopt approaches and concepts that are deeply rooted in biology and system biology, e.g., molecular structures, pathways and their receptors at the tissue and cellular level, proteins that participate in these processes, proteomics, genomics, and biomimetics. In “Biomechanics and Biorheology of Red Blood Cells in Sickle Cell Anemia” from the Karniadakis group a comprehensive review describes the state of the art multiscale modeling and experimental results of Sickle cell anemia. [...]in “Understanding the Fluid Mechanics Behind Transverse Wall Shear Stress“ Spencer Sherwin and Peter Weinberg groups describe the role of fluctuating Dean vortices in generating transverse Wall Shear Stress.