Figure 5.

The force hotspots form a balanced system of strongly localized forces. (A) Reconstructed tangential traction forces at the final time point of spreading for the cell presented in Fig. 3 with three manually defined adhesion hotspot areas indicated by blue, green, and orange circles. The color coding is valid for all subfigures. The magenta scale bar corresponds to 5 μm and white scale bar corresponds to 5 kPa. (B) Time evolution of the magnitude of the traction force vectors obtained by integrating the traction vector field in each individually marked adhesion area. (C) Time evolution of the x components of the traction force vectors for the each individually marked adhesion area. The red curve shows sum of all three components. (D) The time evolution of the y components of the traction force vectors for each individually marked adhesion area. The red curve shows sum of all three components. The example platelet shown here is also shown in Figs. 1B, 3, and 4A. To see this figure in color, go online.