Extended Data Fig. 10: Tension anisotropy promotes fibroblast activation levels independent of extracellular collagen concentration.
To examine whether tension anisotropy enhances fibroblast activation within tissues of higher collagen concentrations, we increased collagen concentration from 1 mg/ml (as used in Fig. 5) to 2 mg/ml. Similar to cells in tissues with low collagen concentration (Fig. 5), fibroblasts exhibited higher activation levels in the anisotropic region compared to the isotropic region, indicating that tension anisotropy can activate fibroblasts within matrices of varying collagen concentrations. Data represents the intensity of F-actin per cell. The height of the bars and the error bars indicate the mean and the standard error, respectively (n = 44 and 40 images). Statistical analysis was performed using the two-sided unpaired Student’s t-test.
