Correlating cell distance with sympathetic alignment

Abstract

Contact guidance is the tendency of cells to reorient themselves with one another andmigrate due to anisotropy like aligned fibrins, serving purpose in sustaining healthy tissue as well as promoting cancer progression. To better understand contact guidance, a computational tool is developed to analyze cell migration and elongation in fibrin gels as distance between cells are varied. The results indicated that cells tend not to elongate when closer together and sees more elongation farther apart, while the opposite trend is seen for cell alignment. These results do not fully align with the hypothesis, opening discussion for improvement opportunities with the tool.