Quantitative measurement of cell motility associated with transformed phenotype.

The motility of individual mammalian cells is crucial for many biological processes. This report describes a new technique to quantitate cell motility, momentary alterations of cell shape, based on trace images obtained by video-image analyses and computer techniques. By means of this system, quantitation of cell motility could be automatically done without human observation or subjective judgement. Quantitative data from transformed and nontransformed rodent fibroblasts revealed that the cell motility measured here was related to the expression of such transformed phenotypes as morphological changes and tumorigenicity.