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Published May 7, 2013 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Strain propagation in artificial extracellular matrix proteins can accelerate cell spreading and polarization

Abstract

In recent years the ability of cells to sense the mechanical properties of their environments and deform them locally has become increasingly clear. To better understand the mechanical coupling between cells and their surroundings, we have examined the dynamics of adhesion of Chinese hamster ovary cells cultured on engineered protein substrates with different viscoelastic properties. We find that cell spreading and polarization rates vary two- and five-fold, respectively, for crosslinked and uncrosslinked proteins, despite the fact that the rates of growth of individual adhesion complexes on the different substrates are comparable. A wave of adhesion growth along the cell contour is observed by total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy for cells plated on crosslinked materials, but not on uncrosslinked substrates. We propose a mechanism in which cell-induced strains accumulate in crosslinked materials as a result of adhesion growth. Strain propagation within the material explains the observed adhesion growth patterns and the increased rates of spreading and polarization characteristic of cells cultured on crosslinked substrates. We investigate the proposed mechanism through Brownian dynamics simulation.

Additional Information

© 2013 The Royal Society of Chemistry. Received 15th September 2012. Accepted 29th April 2013. First published online 07 May 2013. We acknowledge Dr Eileen Fong for discussion and help in protein expression. We also thank Dr Zhen-Gang Wang for advice on the simulation model. S.T. was supported by the Human Frontier Science Program Cross-Disciplinary Fellowship. This work was supported by the NSF Center for the Science and Engineering of Materials and by NSF DMR 1206121 at the California Institute of Technology.

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