Figure 2.

(a) Aligned cell body area $A\left(t\right)$ and (b), reduced cell body aligned area $A\left(t\right)/A_0$ T24 cells ($n=11$) as a function of time, rescaled by a cell-dependent spreading coefficients ${\tau }^{\prime }$ in a and τ in b calculated by linear regression. The curves are seen to collapse initially for both a and b. Crosses indicate the points $\left(t^{\ast }/{\tau }^{\prime },A^{\ast }\right)$ in a and $\left(t^{\ast }/\tau ,+A^{\ast }/A_0\right)$ in b for each cell, where spreading ceases to be a linear function of time according to least square error. (c) Box plots of A₀, α, $t^{\ast }$, $A^{\ast }$ and $a^{\ast }=A^{\ast }/A_0$ showing the sample minimum, lower quartile, median, higher quartile, and sample maximum relative to their mean value μ of $n=11$ cells. Mean μ and coefficient of variation $\sigma /\mu$ are indicated in each case. (d) Top, shape of a spreading T24 cell in $\left(x,z\right)$ plane for $A\left(t\right)/A_0=1.03\gtrsim a^{\ast }$ observed by confocal microscopy: Green, actin-GFP; blue, nucleus labeled with Hoescht 33342. Scale bar, 3 μm. Bottom, $\left(x,y\right)$ slice of actin-GFP of the same cell, showing the actin cortex thickness.