Viscoelastic response of contractile filament bundles

Abstract

The actin cytoskeleton of adherent tissue cells often condenses into filament bundles contracted by myosin motors, so-called stress fibers, which play a crucial role in the mechanical interaction of cells with their environment. Stress fibers are usually attached to their environment at the endpoints, but possibly also along their whole length. We introduce a theoretical model for such contractile filament bundles which combines passive viscoelasticity with active contractility. The model equations are solved analytically for two different types of boundary conditions. A free boundary corresponds to stress fiber contraction dynamics after laser surgery and results in good agreement with experimental data. Imposing cyclic varying boundary forces allows us to calculate the complex modulus of a single stress fiber.

Revtex with 24 pages, 7 Postscript figures included, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. E

References in corpus (2)

• A master relation defines the nonlinear viscoelasticity of single fibroblasts
• Hysteresis in the cell response to time-dependent substrate stiffness

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Physics of adherent cells
• Onsager's variational principle in active soft matter
• Contraction of cross-linked actomyosin bundles
• Active elastic dimers: Cells moving on rigid tracks
• A computational study of stress fiber-focal adhesion dynamics governing cell contractility
• The positioning of stress fibers in contractile cells minimizes internal mechanical stress