Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 43: Cytoskeletal Filaments

BP 43.2: Talk

Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 15:30–15:45, HÜL 386

Structure and Dynamics of Stress fibers in adult Stem Cells — •Carina Wollnik¹, Benjamin Eltzner², Stephan Huckemann², and Florian Rehfeldt¹ — ¹Third-Institute of Physics - Biophysics, Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany — ²Institute for Mathematical Stochastics, Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany

Adult human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) are capable of differentiation towards various cell types such as nerve, bone, and muscle precursor cells. Strikingly, substrate stiffness as physical stimulus is enough to guide hMSCs towards different lineages in the absence of additional biochemical stimuli [1]. Connecting focal adhesions throughout the cell, stress fibres generate and transmit tension [3], lack of which stops the differentiation process [1]. Characteristic stress fibre reorganisation patterns are detected after 24 hours and used as early morphological marker [2], backed up with genetic evidence [6]. Here, we present data from massive parallel live cell imaging of mechano-guided early stem cell differentiation of RFP-Lifeact transfected hMSCs [7]. Stress fibres are traced with sophisticated tracking algorithms [4,5].

[1] A. Engler et al., Cell (2006) [2] A. Zemel et al., Nature Physics (2010) [3] E. K. Paluch et al, BMC Biology (2015) [4] B. Eltzner et al., PLoS One (2015) [5] S. Huckemann et al., Bernoulli (2016) [6] C. Wollnik et al., in preparation (2016+) [7] C. Wollnik et al., in preparation (2016+)