Volume changes during active shape fluctuations in cells

Abstract

Cells modify their volume in response to changes in osmotic pressure but it is usually assumed that other active shape variations do not involve significant volume fluctuations. Here we report experiments demonstrating that water transport in and out of the cell is needed for the formation of blebs, commonly observed protrusions in the plasma membrane driven by cortex contraction. We develop and simulate a model of fluid mediated membrane-cortex deformations and show that a permeable membrane is necessary for bleb formation which is otherwise impaired. Taken together our experimental and theoretical results emphasize the subtle balance between hydrodynamics and elasticity in actively driven cell morphological changes.

Phys. Rev. Lett. in press. 13 pages 4 figures, 9 supplementary figures

References in corpus (6)

• The Mechanics and Statistics of Active Matter
• Active Membrane Fluctuations Studied by Micropipet Aspiration
• AQP1 Is Not Only a Water Channel: It Contributes to Cell Migration through Lin7/Beta-Catenin
• Force balance and membrane shedding at the Red Blood Cell surface
• The size, shape, and dynamics of cellular blebs
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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Discontinuous fluidisation transition in assemblies of actively-deforming particles: A new paradigm for collective motion in dense active materials
• Mechanical stress as a regulator of cell motility
• Bleb Nucleation through Membrane Peeling
• Hydrodynamics of a Semipermeable Vesicle Under Flow and Confinement
• Landau theory of bending-to-stretching transition
• Structure--property relationships of cell clusters in biotissues: 2D analysis
• A surface finite element method for computational modelling of cell blebbing