Scientist observes surprising behavior of cells during blood-vessel formation
Biologists tend to look at cells in bulk, observing them as a group and taking the average behavior as the norm -- the assumption is that genetically identical cells all behave the same way. In a paper to be published in the online Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 7, 2011, Sam Sia, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, presents the results of his four-year tissue-engineering study that show a surprising range of variation in how individual cells behave during formation of a blood vessel. Sia and his team used a new method to painstakingly observe and track individual behaviors, characterizing, for the first time, what happens when human endothelial cells move from an initial dispersed state to the formation of capillary-like structures.