Figure 2 | Scientific Reports

Figure 2

From: Extracellular matrix stiffness regulates human airway smooth muscle contraction by altering the cell-cell coupling

Figure 2

(A) The phase contrast image shows a two ASM cell pair, the traction field generated by this “micro-tissue” is split in two (yellow for cell1 and blue for cell2) by manually outlining each cell in the image. The force exerted on the cell-cell junction but each cell \({\overrightarrow{F}}_{jcell}\) can be calculated as the unbalanced traction force in that cell. (B) The average magnitude of the longitudinal tension of ASM cells in our two-cell ensemble \(\langle \Vert {N}_{xx,cell}\Vert \rangle \) (p < 0.001; N = 8, Mann-Whitney). (C) Average magnitude of the force exerted at the cell-cell junction \(\langle \Vert {\overrightarrow{F}}_{j,cell}\Vert \rangle \) (p < 0.001; N = 8, Mann-Whitney). (D) Strength of the coupling between the two ASM cells, Ψ calculated using equation (3) (p < 0.05; N = 8, t-test). The height of each bar represents the mean value and the error bar represents the standard deviation of the measurements.

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