Motility Characteristics of Maze Navigating Fibroblasts

Micropatterned substrates, in the form of mazes, are utilized to study cell migration. Highly motile cells such as fibroblasts rely on complex combination of forces exerted by the surrounding environment and neighboring cells to achieve motion. Substrate stiffness and topology of the patterned maze, together with the cell-cell neighbor interaction are shown to enhance or inhibit cells’ self-propulsive behavior. Fluorescence imaging was used to quantify kinematics of the contractile motion of fibroblasts. It is shown that the density of cell population is a critical variable, and that, for sufficiently high densities, cells appear to self-organize into groups that move around (that is “solve the maze”) in qualitatively different manner we termed “rule following” and “cheating”. The motility analysis shows that Hurst exponent of cell dynamics shows a spread of values, indicating that only a fraction of cells follows near-diffusive dynamics, with other, non-diffusive modes of motion being clearly present as well. Similarly, the motility index and chemotactic index analysis show qualitatively more than one mode of cells.
We acknowledge support from Cornell CNF (NSF) and BNL CFN (US DoE).