Microbuckling of Fibrin Provides a Mechanism for Cell Mechanosensing

Abstract

Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that propagate over a longer range than predicted by linear elasticity. Synthetic, linear elastic hydrogels used in many mechanotransduction studies fail to capture this effect. We develop a nonlinear microstructural finite element model for a fiber network to simulate localized deformations induced by cells. The model captures measured cell- induced matrix displacements from experiments and identifies an important mechanism for long range cell mechanosensing: loss of compression stiffness due to microbuckling of individual fibers. We show evidence that cells sense each other through the formation of localized intercellular bands of tensile deformations caused by this mechanism.

11 pages, 6 figures. +14 pages supplementary material (+ 7 figures). Modified extensively after review

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Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Mean-field interactions between living cells in linear and nonlinear elastic matrices
• Structural features and nonlinear rheology of self-assembled networks of cross-linked semiflexible polymers
• Nonlinear Poisson effect in affine semiflexible polymer networks
• TopoGEN: topology-driven microstructure generation for in silico modeling of fiber network mechanics
• Geometry-Driven Mechanical Memory in a Random Fibrous Matrix
• Nonlinear master relation in microscopic mechanical response of semiflexible biopolymer networks
• Variational approximation method for the long-range force transmission in biopolymer gels
• A constitutive framework for distortional-mode-dependent failure in soft materials: Tension-compression asymmetry and beyond