Question

What is density dependence? What is anchorage dependence? When looking at a culture of cells how can you tell if density dependence was exhibited?

Answer 1

Density dependence is the phenomenon of ceasing of cell division when cells sense crowding, in other words density. They randomly stop at any point in the cell cycle the moment they realize the increasing competition for nutrients, space and growth factors.

Anchorage dependence is the phenomenon for cell division upon contact to a stable solid surface.

In a culture, if the cells donot divide beyond a certain optical density, then one can say that density dependence is observed