Fig. 5.

Illustration of circular statistics used to analyze cell alignment. Cardiac fibroblasts were stained with Alexa488 phalloidin and confocal images collected. Representative images of 12 h detached gels illustrating two levels of alignment: Top row showing aligned cells from the edge (within 2 mm of the physical edge of the gel) of a detached gel r = 0.421 and bottom row cells from the center of a detached gel exhibit less alignment r = 0.077. Mean directions indicated by arrows inset on histogram; bars represent the number of cells with a given alignment. Narrower peak (upper histogram) around the mean indicates greater degree of alignment. Table 1 shows the results of this analysis for multiple time points using six gels per time point