Origin of slow stress relaxation in the cytoskeleton

Abstract

Dynamically crosslinked semiflexible biopolymers such as the actin cytoskeleton govern the mechanical behavior of living cells. Semiflexible biopolymers nonlinearly stiffen in response to mechanical loads, whereas the crosslinker dynamics allow for stress relaxation over time. Here we show, through rheology and theoretical modeling, that the combined nonlinearity in time and stress leads to an unexpectedly slow stress relaxation, similar to the dynamics of disordered systems close to the glass transition. Our work suggests that transient crosslinking combined with internal stress can explain prior reports of soft glassy rheology of cells, in which the shear modulus increases weakly with frequency.

arXiv comment6 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Non-linear stress relaxation of transient-crosslinked biopolymer networks
• Strain-controlled critical slowing down in the rheology of disordered networks
• Bending fluctuations in semiflexible, inextensible, slender filaments in Stokes flow: towards a spectral discretization
• Compression-induced continuous phase transition in the buckling of a semiflexible filament for two and three dimensions
• A Linear Time-Variant Rheological Model for Frictional Aging, Stress Relaxation, and Creep
• Viscoelastic scaling regimes for marginally-rigid fractal spring networks