New article out in Scientific Reports!

Our recent, collaborative effort to establish an approach to identify a universal set of genes that regulate the material-induced phenotypical response of hMSCs has just been published in Scientific Reports!

In this manuscript, we obtained proof of principle for the correlation between image-based cell features and cell signalling and 11 basic cell shape features. There is likely an opportunity for mechanistic information within cell organelle shape and associated correlations with phenotype. The approach can be taken much further and feed into the creation of large-scale computational models which describe biomaterial surface design, cell shape and cell phenotype. This approach is referred to as Quantitative Structure–Activity Relationships (QSAR) and is widely used to model the biological activity of pharmaceutical compounds. It allows predicting the biological efect of untested compounds and thus narrowing down the search space. Read the full article here.