The orderly shaping and positioning of osteoblasts in the vicinities of circuli, and
the supracellular patterns of microtubule alignment in osteoblasts and fibroblasts,
may on the other hand, be features that occur as a response to, rather than being the
cause of, the orderly spatial patterns in the extracellular matrix material that they
secrete. For example, oriented locomotion and elongation of cells with respect to
aligned collagen fibres in the substratum is well established (see Dunn, 1982).
Indeed, one of the earliest demonstrations of this phenomenon used the oriented
collagen layers of fish-scale fibrillary plates as a substratum (Weiss & Taylor, 1956).