Cells respond to their mechanical environment in different ways: while their response in terms of differentiation and proliferation has been widely studied, the question of the direction in which cells align when subject to a complex mechanical loading in a 3D environment is still widely open. In the present paper, we formulate the hypothesis that the cells orientate in the direction of unitary stretch computed from the right Cauchy-Green tensor in a given mechanical environment. The implications of this hypothesis are studied in different simple cases corresponding to either the available in vitro experimental data or physiological conditions, starting from finite element analysis results to computed preferential cellular orientation. The present contribution is a first step to the formulation of a deeper understanding of the orientation of cells within or at the surface of any 3D scaffold subject to any complex load. It is believed that these initial preferential directions have strong implications as far as the anisotropy of biological structures is concerned.
Keywords: cell mechanics; mechanobiology; mechanosensing; numerical simulation; scaffold.