Cell invasion (2) : First experiments

Experiments on the trans-endothelial migration and collagen invasion of tumor cells have been published in a paper by C. Mierke et al. in Biophys J. 94, 2832 (2008).

With their assay,


the authors meassured the invasion depth of the cells into a 3D collagen gel fiber network. They compared two cases. In case 1 (dark gray bars), the cells first had to transmigrate through a HUVEC endothelial barrier before they could invade into the collagen. In case 2 (light gray bars), the barrier was missing. The results are shown below:


A semilog-plot of the data suggests an exponential invasion profile:


This behaviour would correspond to the "chemo-repellant" case of the model posted as Cell invasion (1).