Mechanical stress as a regulator of cell motility

Abstract

The motility of a cell can be triggered or inhibited not only by an applied force but also by a mechanically neutral force couple. This type of loading, represented by an applied stress and commonly interpreted as either squeezing or stretching, can originate from extrinsic interaction of a cell with its neighbors. To quantify the effect of applied stresses on cell motility we use an analytically transparent one-dimensional model accounting for active myosin contraction and induced actin turnover. We show that stretching can polarize static cells and initiate cell motility while squeezing can symmetrize and arrest moving cells. We show further that sufficiently strong squeezing can lead to the loss of cell integrity. The overall behavior of the system depends on the two dimensionless parameters characterizing internal driving (chemical activity) and external loading (applied stress). We construct a phase diagram in this parameter space distinguishing between, static, motile and collapsed states. The obtained results are relevant for the mechanical understanding of contact inhibition and the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition.

arXiv comment12 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• One dimensional cell motility patterns
• Review: How dynamic prestress governs the shape of living systems, from the subcellular to tissue scale
• Stability of Contraction-Driven Cell Motion
• Colliding cells: when active segments behave as active particles
• Cell crawling on a compliant substrate: a biphasic relation with linear friction
• Optogenetic control of intracellular flows and cell migration: a comprehensive mathematical analysis with a minimal active gel model
• Active gel segment behaving as an active particle
• Stability of steady states and bifurcation to traveling waves in a free boundary model of cell motility
• Cell motility as an energy minimization process
• Giant density fluctuations in locally hyperuniform states
• Initiation of motility on a compliant substrate
• Traveling wave solution for a coupled incompressible Darcy's free boundary problem with surface tension