The past 20 years have witnessed ever-growing evidence that the mechanical properties of biological tissues, from nanoscale to macroscale dimensions, are fundamental for cellular behaviour and consequent tissue functionality. This knowledge, combined with previously known biochemical cues, has greatly advanced the field of biomaterial development, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. It is now established that approaches to engineer biological tissues must integrate and approximate the mechanics, both static and dynamic, of native tissues. Nevertheless, the literature on the mechanical properties of biological tissues differs greatly in methodology, and the available data are widely dispersed. This Review gathers together the most important data on the stiffness of living tissues and discusses the intricacies of tissue stiffness from a materials perspective, highlighting the main challenges associated with engineering lifelike tissues and proposing a unified view of this as yet unreported topic. Emerging advances that might pave the way for the next decade’s take on bioengineered tissue stiffness are also presented, and differences and similarities between tissues in health and disease are discussed, along with various techniques for characterizing tissue stiffness at various dimensions from individual cells to organs.

在过去的20年中，越来越多的证据表明，从纳米尺度到宏观尺度，生物组织的机械性能对于细胞行为和随之而来的组织功能至关重要。这些知识与先前已知的生化线索相结合，极大地推动了生物材料开发，组织工程和再生医学领域的发展。现在已经确定，对生物组织进行工程处理的方法必须整合并近似自然组织的静态和动态力学。然而，有关生物组织力学特性的文献在方法上差异很大，并且可获得的数据广泛分散。这篇综述收集了有关活组织刚度的最重要数据，并从材料的角度讨论了组织刚度的复杂性，强调了与工程化的栩栩如生的组织相关的主要挑战，并对尚未报道的话题提出了统一的看法。还提出了可能为生物工程组织刚度的下一个十年铺平道路的新兴进展，并讨论了健康和疾病组织之间的差异和相似之处，以及用于表征从单个细胞到器官的各个维度的组织刚度的各种技术。