Cells sense and respond to the physical properties of their environment and this is dependent on dynamic sub cellular systems that can generate and transduce mechanical force. Downstream integration of these signals into biochemical and genomic pathways cause observable and measurable effects on cell life. Our lab seeks to understand how cells sense and respond to mechanical forces in 2D and 3D microenvironments under different conditions during cell division and migration and to use this information to find a critical role of traction forces in a number of fundamental biological processes including cell diffentiation, angiogenesis, inflammation, wound healing, and metastasis. The social amoeba Distyostelium discoideum has been using as a model organism at our lab. We use live-cell imaging with different microscopes, biochemistry, molecular biology and computational tools to determine the functional organization of cytoskeleton with traction force.