Fig. 11.

The orientations of cells at different radial locations that would occur if the cells aligned with the mean wall shear stress (WSS) or aligned to obtain minimum transverse WSS (transWSSmin) and the observed modal orientations of cells and their nuclei. These alignments are defined as for Fig. 9; −90 and +90° are equivalent since the two ends of the nuclei are indistinguishable. Data from the three locations nearest the center of the well were excluded since χ²-tests showed random cellular orientations in all three replicates, and the modal values are therefore determined by noise in these cases. (Directions defined by the shear metrics also become increasingly noisy toward the center.)