A minimal physical model captures the shapes of crawling cells

Abstract

Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into motility have been gained from experiments replicating such motion in vitro. Such experiments show that crawling uses a combination of actin treadmilling (polymerization), which pushes the front of a cell forward, and myosin-induced stress (contractility), which retracts the rear. Here we present a simplified physical model of a crawling cell, consisting of a droplet of active polar fluid with contractility throughout, but treadmilling connected to a thin layer near the supporting wall. The model shows a variety of shapes and/or motility regimes, some closely resembling cases seen experimentally. Our work strongly supports the view that cellular motility exploits autonomous physical mechanisms whose operation does not need continuous regulatory effort.

37 pages, 11 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (1)

• Viscous Fingering-like Instability of Cell Fragments

Cited by in corpus (33)

• Dynamics of active liquid interfaces
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• Contractile and chiral activities co-determine the helicity of swimming droplet trajectories
• Design of nematic liquid crystals to control microscale dynamics
• Thermodynamics of active field theories: Energetic cost of coupling to reservoirs
• Active phase separation: new phenomenology from non-equilibrium physics
• Optimal transport and control of active drops
• Flow of deformable droplets: discontinuous shear thinning and velocity oscillations
• Mechanical stress as a regulator of cell motility
• Tractionless Self-Propulsion of Active Drops
• Fingering Instability of Active Nematic Droplets
• Rheology of active polar emulsions: from linear to unidirectional and unviscid flow, and intermittent viscosity
• The crucial role of adhesion in the transmigration of active droplets through interstitial orifices
• How many ways a cell can move: the modes of self-propulsion of an active drop
• Morphology and flow patterns in highly asymmetric active emulsions
• Chaotic and periodical dynamics of active chiral droplets
• Soft channel formation and symmetry breaking in exotic active emulsions
• Anchoring-driven spontaneous rotations in active gel droplets
• Symmetry-breaking, motion and bistability of active drops through polarization-surface coupling
• Rheology of active emulsions with negative effective viscosity
• Minimal Model of Directed Cell Motility on Patterned Substrates
• Shear dynamics of an inverted nematic emulsion
• Active gel segment behaving as an active particle
• Incompressible polar active fluids with quenched disorder in dimensions $d>2$
• Self-propulsion of an active polar drop
• Switching dynamics in cholesteric liquid crystal emulsions
• Shapes and dynamic regimes of a polar active fluid droplet under confinement
• Chemomechanical motility modes of partially wetting liquid droplets
• Dynamics of a cell motility model near the sharp interface limit
• Uniqueness and traveling waves in a cell motility model
• What is active wetting?
• Motility and self propulsion of active droplets