QUANTITATIVE CHARACTERIZATION OF CONTACT GUIDANCE IN RECONSTITUTED COLLAGEN GELS BY COMPUTER­ASSISTED THREE DIMENSIONAL CELL TRACKING

Cell migration can be classified as random and nonrandom, depending on the isotropic or anisotropic nature of the extracellular environment. Nonrandom (or "directed") migration, while being of greater interest in vivo because it can lead to cell accumulation, presents many difficulties experimentally, especially in creating a biologically-relevant well-defined anisotropic environment, and theoretically in properly modelling a biased random walk. When nonrandom cell migration is characterized as "bidirectional", i.e. the cell has equal and maximum probabilities of translating in opposite directions, the phenomenon is referred to as contact guidance.