Department of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Cell Adh Migr. 2012 May-Jun;6(3):274-9. doi: 10.4161/cam.21076. Epub 2012 May 1.
Cellular studies have long been performed on the bench top, within Petri dishes and flasks that expose cells to surroundings that differ greatly from their native environment. The complexity of a human tissue is such that to truly replicate a cell's physiologic microenvironment in vitro is currently impossible. It is nevertheless important to determine how various factors of the microenvironment interact to drive cell behavior, particularly with regard to disease states, such as cancer. Here we focus on two key elements of the cellular microenvironment, matrix stiffness and architecture, in the context of tumor cell behavior. We discuss recent work focusing on the effects of these individual properties on cancer cell migration and describe one technique developed by our lab that could be applied to dissect the effects of specific structural and mechanical cues, and which may lead to useful insights into the potentially synergistic effects of these properties on tumor cell behavior.
细胞研究长期以来一直是在实验台上进行的，在培养皿和烧瓶中，这些器皿中的细胞所处的环境与它们的自然环境有很大的不同。人类组织非常复杂，以至于目前还不可能在体外真正复制细胞的生理微环境。然而，重要的是要确定微环境的各种因素如何相互作用以驱动细胞行为，特别是在疾病状态下，如癌症。在这里，我们重点讨论细胞微环境中的两个关键因素，基质硬度和结构，在肿瘤细胞行为的背景下。我们讨论了最近的工作，重点关注这些单个特性对癌细胞迁移的影响，并描述了我们实验室开发的一种技术，该技术可用于剖析特定结构和机械线索的影响，这可能为深入了解这些特性对肿瘤细胞行为的潜在协同作用提供有用的见解。
