Dresden 2014 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 7: Posters: Cell adhesion, mechanics and migration
BP 7.5: Poster
Monday, March 31, 2014, 17:30–19:30, P3
Stress fibre organisation dynamics in adult stem cells — •Carina Wollnik1, Kwang-Rae Kim2, Ina Schachtschneider2, Carsten Gottschlich2, Stephan Huckemann2, and Florian Rehfeldt1 — 1Third Institute of Physics - Biophysics, Georg-August-University, Göttingen, Germany — 2Institute for Mathematical Stochastics, Georg-August-University, Göttingen, Germany
Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) from bone marrow differentiate into other cell types like nerve, bone, and muscle cells. Here mechanical cues can be as important as biochemical ones as demonstrated by Engler et al. [1]. They showed substrate stiffness guides hMSCs towards different lineages in the absence of additional biochemical stimuli. Stress fibres composed of actin filaments, binding- and crosslinking-proteins and myosin motor-proteins, generate and transmit forces within the cell and to the ECM. Blocked motor-proteins stop the cell differentiation process, so stress fibre activity seems crucial. Though the differentiation process takes up to weeks, early characteristic stress fibre reorganisation can be detected within the first 24 hours and used as an early morphological marker[2]. In our experiments we use live-cell imaging of RFP-Lifeact transfected hMSCs and trace the stress fibres with sophisticated filament tracking algorithms [3], which enable us to investigate the dynamics of stress fibre formation in early stages after seeding that leads to a non-monotonic dependence of stress fibre polarization on the Young's modulus of the underlying substrate. [1]Engler et. al., 2006 [2]Zemel and F. Rehfeldt et al., 2010 [3]Gottschlich et al., 2009