Adhesiveness and stickiness: two independent properties of the cell surface.

For the purposes of this report, adhesiveness was defined as that force which resists the mechanical separation of attached pairs of cells, and stickiness as the tendency of cells to cling to a foreign substrate; in the present experiments the substrate employed was glass. The cells selected for study were from the normal rabbit epiderm and the V2 rabbit carcinoma. Adhesiveness was determined by measuring the bend produced in a calibrated microneedle when subjected to the strain of pulling apart an attached pair of cells. Stickiness was measured by calculating the percentage of cells clinging to a glass surface after being dipped 3 times in salt solution. I t was found that the normal epidermal cells were strongly adhesive but not very sticky, whereas the cancer cells were extremely sticky but poorly adhesive. Thus, it was concluded that the two properties are different and independent. Possible explanations and implications of the results are discussed and further studies suggested.