A Model for Cell Migration by Contact Guidance

Abstract

Contact guidance is a bias in cell migration in response to a structural anisotropy, such as aligned grooves etched into a surface (Matthes & Gruler 1988) or in a three-dimensional matrix of aligned fibrils (e.g., in a collagen gel (Dunn & Ebendal 1978, Dickinson et al. 1993)). On these substrata, cells show a bi-directional orientation bias (Dunn & Brown 1986, Guido & Tranquillo 1993) and move preferentially along the axis of alignment. The contact guidance response can be quantified by measuring cell motility coefficients (i.e. diffusion coefficients) parallel and perpendicular to the axis of alignment, μ _xx and μ _yy , respectively. For example, we have shown that migrating fibroblasts in aligned collagen gels have an increase in µ _xx and a corresponding decrease in µ _yy as a function of fiber alignment (Dickinson et al. 1993).