ArticleBiophysical journal2009
Vascular smooth muscle cell durotaxis depends on substrate stiffness gradient strength.
Article in Biophysical journal, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 163 papers.
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Who cites it
163 citing papers in PubMed.
- Physiomimetic culture bias durotaxis toward soft environments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A soft-stiff patterned bioengineering model reveals kinase pathways driving directional cell migration in pulmonary arterial hypertension.Biomaterials science · 2025Article
- Engineered In Vitro Platforms for Mechanochemical Control of Cell Migration.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology · 2025Review
- Durotaxis is a driver and potential therapeutic target in lung fibrosis and metastatic pancreatic cancer.Nature cell biology · 2025Article
- Survivin modulates stiffness-induced vascular smooth muscle cell motility.APL bioengineering · 2025Article
- Unraveling the metabolic pathways between atherosclerosis and sarcopenia.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2025Review
- In silico analysis shows that dynamic changes in curvature guide cell migration over long distances.Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology · 2024Article
- Polyzwitterion-grafted decellularized bovine intercostal arteries as new substitutes of small-diameter arteries for vascular regeneration.Regenerative biomaterials · 2024Article
- From stress fiber to focal adhesion: a role of actin crosslinkers in force transmission.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2024Review
- Durotaxis and negative durotaxis: where should cells go?Communications biology · 2023Review
- Materials and extracellular matrix rigidity highlighted in tissue damages and diseases: Implication for biomaterials design and therapeutic targets.Bioactive materials · 2023Review
- Quantification of cell migration: metrics selection to model application.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2023Review
- Substrate stiffness modulates migration and local intercellular membrane motion in pulmonary endothelial cell monolayers.American journal of physiology. Cell physiology · 2022Article
- Directed cell migration towards softer environments.Nature materials · 2022Article
- Biomimetic Hydrogels in the Study of Cancer Mechanobiology: Overview, Biomedical Applications, and Future Perspectives.Gels (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- The Extracellular Matrix Stiffening: A Trigger of Prostate Cancer Progression and Castration Resistance?Cancers · 2022Review
- Amoeboid-like migration ensures correct horizontal cell layer formation in the developing vertebrate retina.eLife · 2022Article
- Regulation of cell attachment, spreading, and migration by hydrogel substrates with independently tunable mesh size.Acta biomaterialia · 2022Article
- Multiscale mechanobiology: Coupling models of adhesion kinetics and nonlinear tissue mechanics.Biophysical journal · 2022Article
- Visible-Light Stiffness Patterning of GelMA Hydrogels TowardsFrontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Article
103 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Mechanical compliance is emerging as an important environmental cue that can influence certain cell behaviors, such as morphology and motility. Recent in vitro studies have shown that cells preferentially migrate from less stiff to more stiff substrates; however, much of this phenomenon, termed durotaxis, remains ill-defined. To address this problem, we studied the morphology and motility of vascular smooth muscle cells on well-defined stiffness gradients. Baselines for cell spreading, polarization, and random motility on uniform gels with moduli ranging from 5 to 80 kPa were found to increase with increasing stiffness. Subsequent analysis of the behavior of vascular smooth muscle cells on gradient substrata (0-4 kPa/100 mum, with absolute moduli of 1-80 kPa) demonstrated that the morphology on gradient gels correlated with the absolute modulus. In contrast, durotaxis (evaluated quantitatively as the tactic index for a biased persistent random walk) and cell orientation with respect to the gradient both increased with increasing magnitude of gradient, but were independent of the absolute modulus. These observations provide a foundation for establishing quantitative relationships between gradients in substrate stiffness and cell response. Moreover, these results reveal common features of phenomenological cell response to chemotactic and durotactic gradients, motivating further mechanistic studies of how cells integrate and respond to multiple complex signals.
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