| Project description
This project, with significance to biomaterials as well as basic cell biology
and even drug screening research, is a collaboration between the Bioimplant
Research Group, Dept. for Medicine, Surgery and Orthopaedics at Lund University
(Prof. L.M. Bjursten), and the Chemical Physics group at Chalmers/GU
(Dr. J. Gold). Before this project started, silicon substrates with vertical
micropillars were developed by Sarunas Petronis at Chalmers in the Time and
Functionally Programmed Surfaces project as a well-controlled porous surface
model for studying cell behaviour at surfaces. Initial experiments in cell
culture indicated that cells growing on top of the pillars deflected the
micronwide pillars, and presented a new way of measuring the force exerted
by cells on the underlying surface. The idea to use this for cell force
measurements was the basis for the new project. By knowing the stiffness
(or spring constant) of the pillars, measurement of the deflection of the
top of the pillar can be converted to the force needed to create the deflection.
These are the forces which the cells are exerting on the pillars. In this
project, time-lapse microscopy is used to monitor living cells migrating on
the pillared surfaces, as well as to follow the real time deflection of the
pillars. Image analysis of video sequences allows the plotting of individual
force vec-tors exerted by the individual focal contacts. Since the pillars are
on the order of one or a few microns in size, many pillars are located under
individual cells. It is therefore possible to map the force vectors occurring
around a single cell at any instant in time. Many cell types have been examined
and differences in forces exerted by different cell types have been observed.
This project has now evolved into a Ph.D. student pro-ject, with funding
recently obtained from other external funding sources (VR, Chalmers Bioscience
Programme).
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