How the stretching of extracellular matrix proteins affects cell signaling
Final Report Abstract
During the funding period, I was working as a post-doc in the laboratory for Biologically Oriented Materials (Prof. Viola Vogel) at ETH Zurich. My primary research focused on the measurement of forces that cells apply to their environment. Many previous studies had used microscopic pillar arrays made from an elastic material to visualize and quantify these forces. We found that most studies overestimated the pillar stiffness that is used to convert the measured deflections into forces. An analytical model, numerical simulations and experiments showed that the elastic foundation on which the pillars are anchored substantially contributes to the deflection and effectively reduces the pillar stiffness. We propose a correction factor that guarantees the comparability of results obtained from pillar arrays of different dimensions. As an example, we demonstrate the application of our findings to published data and find a reduction of up to 45% of the measured forces. The initial proposal was aimed towards the understanding of how changes in the extracellular matrix affect cell behavior. The topic was changed during the funding period because of unexpected experimental difficulties.
Publications
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Substrate-Mediated Crosstalk between Elastic Pillars“. Applied Physics Letters 97: 023703 (2010)
Ingmar Schoen
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„Probing Cellular Traction Forces by Micropillar Arrays: Contribution of Substrate Warping to Pillar Deflection“. Nano Letters 10: 1823-1830 (2010)
Ingmar Schoen, Wei Hu, Enrico Klotzsch, and Viola Vogel
