TY  - JOUR
AU  - Soiné, Jérôme R. D.
AU  - Hersch, Nils
AU  - Dreissen, Georg
AU  - Hampe, Nico
AU  - Hoffmann, Bernd
AU  - Merkel, Rudolf
AU  - Schwarz, Ulrich S.
TI  - Measuring cellular traction forces on non-planar substrates
JO  - Interface focus
VL  - 6
IS  - 5
SN  - 2042-8901
CY  - London
PB  - Royal Society Publishing
M1  - FZJ-2016-04442
SP  - 20160024 -
PY  - 2016
AB  - Animal cells use traction forces to sense the mechanics and geometry of their environment. Measuring these traction forces requires a workflow combining cell experiments, image processing and force reconstruction based on elasticity theory. Such procedures have already been established mainly for planar substrates, in which case one can use the Green's function formalism. Here we introduce a workflow to measure traction forces of cardiac myofibroblasts on non-planar elastic substrates. Soft elastic substrates with a wave-like topology were micromoulded from polydimethylsiloxane and fluorescent marker beads were distributed homogeneously in the substrate. Using feature vector-based tracking of these marker beads, we first constructed a hexahedral mesh for the substrate. We then solved the direct elastic boundary volume problem on this mesh using the finite-element method. Using data simulations, we show that the traction forces can be reconstructed from the substrate deformations by solving the corresponding inverse problem with an L1-norm for the residue and an L2-norm for a zeroth-order Tikhonov regularization. Applying this procedure to the experimental data, we find that cardiac myofibroblast cells tend to align both their shapes and their forces with the long axis of the deformable wavy substrate.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000382192900001
C6  - pmid:27708757
DO  - DOI:10.1098/rsfs.2016.0024
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/817803
ER  -