FIGURE 3:

Lm adhesion, but not invasion efficiency, is increased when HMEC-1 reside on stiff hydrogels. HMEC-1 residing on soft (3-kPa) or stiff (70-kPa) PA hydrogels and treated with vehicle control or 2 μM PF537228 FAK inhibitor were infected with Lm (constitutively expressing GFP) at an MOI between 1.5 and 15. At 30 min postinfection, samples were fixed and immunostained, and infection was analyzed by microscopy followed by image processing. Boxplots show (A) total bacteria per cell; (B) internalized bacteria per cell; (C) invasion efficiency (ratio of internalized bacteria to total bacteria); (D) cells in the field of view. Representative data come from one of three independent experiments. N = 800–1000 cells were analyzed for each condition. Two asterisks denote statistically significant differences between the medians of two distributions (<0.01; Wilcoxon rank-sum test).