ArticleBiophysical journal2019
Entropic Forces Drive Cellular Contact Guidance.
Article in Biophysical journal, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- Engineering Biomimetic 3D Microenvironments for Extracellular Vesicle Programming Toward Clinical Translation.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Tension anisotropy drives fibroblast phenotypic transition by self-reinforcing cell-extracellular matrix mechanical feedback.Nature materials · 2025Article
- Effects of Cell Seeding Density, Extracellular Matrix Composition, and Geometry on Yes-Associated Protein Translocation in Corneal Fibroblasts.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Spatial regulation of substrate adhesion directs fibroblast morphotype and phenotype.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Impact of uniaxial cyclic stretching on matrix-associated endothelial cell responses.Materials today. Bio · 2024Article
- Fabrication of Micropatterns of Aligned Collagen Fibrils.Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids · 2024Article
- Effect of Anisotropic Structural Depth on Orientation and Differentiation Behavior of Skeletal Muscle Cells.ACS omega · 2023Article
- Shape-Morphing Photoresponsive Hydrogels Reveal Dynamic Topographical Conditioning of Fibroblasts.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2023Article
- Configurational entropy is an intrinsic driver of tissue structural heterogeneity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Contact Guidance Drives Upward Cellular Migration at the Mesoscopic Scale.Cellular and molecular bioengineering · 2023Article
- Contact Guidance of Connective Tissue Fibroblasts on Submicrometer Anisotropic Topographical Cues Is Dependent on Tissue of Origin, β1 Integrins, and Tensin-1 Recruitment.ACS applied materials & interfaces · 2023Article
- Predicting YAP/TAZ nuclear translocation in response to ECM mechanosensing.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- The influence of entropic crowding in cell monolayers.Biophysical journal · 2022Article
- Cell reorientation on a cyclically strained substrate.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Modeling ATP-mediated endothelial cell elongation on line patterns.Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology · 2022Article
- Entropy as a Geometrical Source of Information in Biological Organizations.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Adipogenesis or osteogenesis: destiny decision made by mechanical properties of biomaterials.RSC advances · 2022Review
- Contact guidance as a consequence of coupled morphological evolution and motility of adherent cells.Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology · 2022Article
- 3D Interfacial and Spatiotemporal Regulation of Human Neuroepithelial Organoids.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2022Article
- Cross-Linked Gelatine by Modified Dextran as a Potential Bioink Prepared by a Simple and Non-Toxic Process.Polymers · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Contact guidance-the widely known phenomenon of cell alignment induced by anisotropic environmental features-is an essential step in the organization of adherent cells, but the mechanisms by which cells achieve this orientational ordering remain unclear. Here, we seeded myofibroblasts on substrates micropatterned with stripes of fibronectin and observed that contact guidance emerges at stripe widths much greater than the cell size. To understand the origins of this surprising observation, we combined morphometric analysis of cells and their subcellular components with a, to our knowledge, novel statistical framework for modeling nonthermal fluctuations of living cells. This modeling framework is shown to predict not only the trends but also the statistical variability of a wide range of biological observables, including cell (and nucleus) shapes, sizes, and orientations, as well as stress-fiber arrangements within the cells with remarkable fidelity with a single set of cell parameters. By comparing observations and theory, we identified two regimes of contact guidance: 1) guidance on stripe widths smaller than the cell size (w ≤ 160 μm), which is accompanied by biochemical changes within the cells, including increasing stress-fiber polarization and cell elongation; and 2) entropic guidance on larger stripe widths, which is governed by fluctuations in the cell morphology. Overall, our findings suggest an entropy-mediated mechanism for contact guidance associated with the tendency of cells to maximize their morphological entropy through shape fluctuations.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.