Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 16: Posters: Cell adhesion, mechanics and migration

BP 16.5: Poster

Monday, March 16, 2015, 17:30–19:30, Poster A

Migration Behavior of Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells on Biomimetic Elastic Substrates — •Daniel Meyer¹, Felix Segerer², Joachim Rädler², and Florian Rehfeldt¹ — ¹3rd Institute of Physics - Biophysics, Georg-August University, Göttingen, Germany — ²Faculty of Physics - Soft Condensed Matter Group, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany

Cell motility and migration processes are vital during biological development and homeostasis, as they are essential in tissue regeneration, morphogenesis, but also in pathological mechanisms like tumor metastasis. While migration due to biochemical gradients (e.g. chemotaxis) is very well studied, the influence of other parameters of the micro-environment such as topography and stiffness are less understood.

Here, we use polyacrylamide (PA) hydrogels in combination with a novel microcontact printing protocol to generate patterned substrates with well-controlled Young's modulus E. These collagen I coated tracks are used to analyze the migration behavior of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSC) by parallelized life cell microscopy to achieve sufficient statistics.We demonstrate that both, elasticity as well as width of the track affect the migration velocity and there is a particular optimum that yields a maximal velocity.