A soft sensor-integrated cell stretching device for precise and reproducible mechanotransduction

Mechanical stretch is a fundamental regulator of cell fate, yet in-vitro replication remains challenging because conventional stretchers deliver non-uniform strain and ignore batch-to-batch variations in substrate stiffness—so the stress actually experienced by cells varies unpredictably. We introduce the first biaxial cell-stretching platform that couples an embedded soft resistive micro-channel sensor with high-frequency closed-loop control. Real-time deformation read-out (60 Hz) drives a 24 kHz actuator loop to compensate for PDMS moduli spanning an order of magnitude, delivering user-defined triangular or square waveforms (5–20 % amplitude; 0.5–10 s period) with &lt; 2 % steady-state error. Closed-loop operation maintains strain-invariant membrane stress within ± 5 %, reducing well-to-well variability three-fold compared with open-loop actuation. Biological validation using immortalized human myoblasts exposed to 10 % cyclic stretch for 4 h produced a significant up-regulation of YA..., , # A soft sensor-integrated cell stretching device for precise and reproducible mechanotransduction Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.bvq83bkmw](10.5061/dryad.bvq83bkmw) ## Description of the data and file structure This repository contains MATLAB code and dataset used in the study: **Duz, N., Ozturk, E., Akar, S., Kumbay Yildiz, S., Dincer, P., & Uyanik, I.** \"A Soft Sensor-Integrated Cell Stretching Device for Precise and Reproducible Mechanotransduction\" <br /> There are 7 folders inside the dataset, that contains the cell attachment data, mRNA of YAP genes data, triple soft sensor data, triangular and square waveforms applied to the soft sensor data (tri-squ data), uniaxial and biaxial stretching of the soft sensor data (uni-bi data), closed-loop control using soft sensor (stress based) and open-loop control (strain based) stretching data (stress-strain data), and finally the visualization of displacements on validation membrane data (heatmap data). The data in the folders have been...,