Therefore, our results indicate that harvesting media exposure determine, at least in part, the therapeutic efficacy of NSCs for TBI. Cells use NSC 207895 filopodia to explore the physical and biochemical characteristics of their environments, and the stabilization of filopodial contacts with the substrate directs cell movement. Filopodia thus play a central role in the recognition of structured surfaces, and support the migration of cells into nanofibrillar Z-DEVD-FMK environments thereby enabling angiogenesis or cancer cell metastasis. Filopodia spontaneously protrude from the edge of various cell types and are thus the first and farthest protruding cellular structures during cell spreading and migration. They are composed of parallel filamentous actin bundles that are nucleated in the lamellipodia actin network via the proposed mechanisms of ����de novo filament nucleation���� or ����convergence elongation����, and get bundled by fascin. After cell seeding, filopodia were found to form the very first substrate contacts prior to cell spreading. The locations where filopodia initially adhered to substrates often direct the position of subsequently formed cell-matrix adhesions within the lamellum. Cells thus take advantage of the filopodia as ����sticky fingers���� to explore their surroundings, which consequently requires that filopodia are able to develop considerable tensile forces by which they pull on their environments. Tensile forces will either immediately rupture or further stabilize filopodia adhesions: the temporal stability of a filopodium increases once a contact with the extracellular matrix has been formed, and is further maintained when cells pull on their substrates. In contrast, those subset of filopodia that fail to establish stable interactions with the extracellular matrix usually bend, move along the cell edge, and fuse with neighboring filopodia, often to be recycled back into the cell lamellum. The presence of tensile forces acting on filopodia adhesions is also reflected by the recruitment of certain force-regulated adaptor and scaffold proteins: the integrin containing cell-matrix adhesions within the filopodia shaft recruit talin and paxillin, VASP, but also vinculin, tensin and even zyxin.