Extended Data Fig. 4: Collagen accumulation reached a plateau over time.
To measure collagen accumulation around a cell, we performed confocal fluorescence and reflectance imaging in three-dimensional volumetric regions surrounding each cell at various time points. We then quantified the degree of collagen accumulation using a custom MATLAB script that averaged the confocal reflectance pixel intensity within volumetric shells surrounding each cell (A). The collagen density in different regions shown in (A) was quantified in (B) where the distance of each region from the cell membrane was presented next to its curve. The highest level of collagen accumulation was observed near the cell (blue line in (B) with 0.4 μm distance from the cell membrane). Also, our results showed that collagen accumulation in all surrounding regions reached a plateau over a time scale of hundreds of minutes.
