Spring in your step? The forces in cartilage

Why healthy cartilage is so resilient–and how disease and aging erode that resilience–is poorly understood on the molecular level. Now Christine Ortiz and Alan Grodzinsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their colleagues are starting to unravel such details.

Although other researchers have studied cartilage’s behavior on the macroscopic scale, the several forces that scientists believe to be active on the molecular level had never been teased apart, says Ortiz.