Effects of Applied EF, Collagen Gel Thickness and Fiber Alignment on Ligament Fibroblast Migration
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Cheng, Yu-Chen
Abstract
This work investigates the effects of electric field (EF), collagen gel thickness and collagen fiber alignment on ligament fibroblast migration. ACL cells live in highly aligned collagen fibers in vivo and studies had shown that cell can feel different substrate stiffness, and different thickness collagen gel have different effective modulus. Therefore, we develop a system that can produce highly aligned collagen fiber and control the thickness of collagen gel. We had two kinds of collagen fiber orientation, random and aligned and two kinds of collagen gel thickness. Cells have different morphology when they were seeded on different collagen fiber orientation and collagen gel thickness. When EF was applied, contact guidance is more potent than EF both in thin and thick collagen groups. When RhoA signaling was modulated, EF became more dominant than contact guidance in the thin collagen groups, whereas contact guidance was still more potent in the thick collagen groups. Our data suggested that, contact guidance mediates cell RhoA activating in the thin collagen groups but not in the thick groups. This also implicates that cell use different signaling pathways to have contact guidance when they were on different collagen gel thickness.
Subjects
cell migration
electrical field
collagen fiber orientation
collagen gel thickness
Type
thesis
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