Fig. 3.

Collagen contraction by fibroblasts. (A) Immunofluorescence staining of β-actin (green) and Hoechst (blue) in HMFs and CXCL12⁺HMFs dispersed in collagen on day 5 of culture. (B) Box plot of cell aspect ratio ($\frac{Width}{Height}$) for HMFs and CXCL12⁺HMFs dispersed in collagen. The boxes represent the 25th and 75th percentiles with the median shown with a horizontal line inside each box. The mean is shown by a cross symbol inside each box. The whiskers represent the 10th and 90th percentiles of the data. Two-tailed Mann-Whitney test was used to calculate p-value. *p<0.01, n=10. (C) Western blot analysis of expression levels of phosphorylated and total MLC2 in HMFs and CXCL12⁺HMFs dispersed in collagen. (D) MLC2 activity quantified as p-MLC2/MLC2 from three separate experiments. Data were normally distributed and two-tailed, unpaired t-test was used to calculate p-value. *p<0.01.