Cell Adhesion Assays - Methods in Molecular Biology: Extracellular Matrix Protocols - page 273

a cell is spread or not. Perhaps the most quantitatively accurate way is to use
image analysis software to measure average cell area, however, this tends to pro-
duce small differences that may be hard to interpret without the application of
other criteria relating to cell shape. Instead, we prefer to assign specific criteria to
a definition of spreading and apply these to each cell. The usual criteria are that
the cell body should be phase-dark and that cytoplasm should be visible around
the entire circumference of the nucleus. Different cells adopt different morpholo-
gies and therefore these criteria might need to be slightly modified on a case by
case basis.
References
1. Kueng, W., Silber, E., and Eppenberger, U. (1989) Quantification of cells cultured
on 96-well plates. Anal. Biochem. 182, 16-19.
2. Yamada, K. M. and Kennedy, D. W. (1984) Dualistic nature of adhesive protein
function: fibronectin and its biologically active peptide fragments can autoinhibit
fibronectin function. J. Cell Biol. 99, 29-36.