Principal Investigator Lorna Gibson
Project Website http://web.mit.edu/dmse/csg/Scaffold_Mechanics.html
Cell Contraction -- A fibroblast on a strut in a collagen-GAG scaffold. Left: Cell at time 2 minutes. Right: Cell at 42 minutes, showing buckling of the strut that the cell is attached to. Knowing the Young’s modulus of the collagen-GAG strut, the contractile force of a single cell can be calculated.
Cell Migration -- Confocal microscopy image of fibroblasts (stained green on a collagen-GAG scaffold (stained red). Right: Spheres indicate the centroids of the cells while the coloured lines track the position of the centroid as a function of time. This data is used to obtain the cell migration speed. This work was done in collaboration with Professor Lauffenburger’s group at MIT.