Several critical cell functions are influenced not only by internal cellular machinery but also by external mechanical and biochemical cues from the surrounding microenvironment. Slight changes to the microenvironment can result in dramatic changes to the cell's phenotype; for example, a change in the nutrients or pH of a tumor microenvironment can result in increased tumor metastasis. While cellular fate and the regulators of cell fate have been studied in detail for several decades now, our understanding of the extracellular regulators remains qualitative and far from comprehensive. In this review, we discuss the microenvironment influence on cell fate in terms of adhesion, migration, and differentiation and focus on both developments in experimental and computation tools to analyze cellular fate.
Keywords: cell adhesion; cell fate; cell migration; computational modeling; extracellular matrix.