Criticality in Cell Adhesion

Abstract

We illuminate the many-body effects underlying the structure, formation, and dissolution of cellular adhesion domains in the presence and absence of forces. We consider mixed Glauber-Kawasaki dynamics of a two-dimensional model of nearest-neighbor interacting adhesion bonds with intrinsic binding-affinity under the action of a shared pulling or pushing force. We consider adhesion bonds that are immobile due to being anchored to the underlying cytoskeleton as well as adhesion molecules that are transiently diffusing. Highly accurate analytical results are obtained on the pair-correlation level of the Bethe-Guggenheim approximation for the complete thermodynamics and kinetics of adhesion clusters of any size, including the thermodynamic limit. A new kind of dynamical phase transition is uncovered -- the mean formation and dissolution times per adhesion bond change discontinuously with respect to the bond-coupling parameter. At the respective critical points cluster formation and dissolution are fastest, while the statistically dominant transition path undergoes a qualitative change -- the entropic barrier to complete binding/unbinding is rate-limiting below, and the phase transition between dense and dilute phases above the dynamical critical point. In the context of the Ising model the dynamical phase transition reflects a first-order discontinuity in the magnetization-reversal time. Our results provide a potential explanation for the mechanical regulation of cell adhesion, and suggest that the quasi-static and kinetic response to changes in the membrane stiffness or applied forces is largest near the statical and dynamical critical point, respectively.

arXiv commentVersion accepted for publication in Physical Review X

References in corpus (22)

• Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems
• Physics of adherent cells
• Rupture of multiple parallel molecular bonds under dynamic loading
• Stability of adhesion clusters under constant force
• Stochastic dynamics of adhesion clusters under shared constant force and with rebinding
• Binding cooperativity of membrane adhesion receptors
• Impact of receptor-ligand distance on adhesion cluster stability
• Force-dependent switch in protein unfolding pathways and transition state movements
• Binding constants of membrane-anchored receptors and ligands: a general theory corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations
• Plasticity of hydrogen bond networks regulates mechanochemistry of cell adhesion complexes
• Interlacing Relaxation and First-Passage Phenomena in Reversible Discrete and Continuous Space Markovian Dynamics
• Duality Between Relaxation and First Passage in Reversible Markov Dynamics: Rugged Energy Landscapes Disentangled
• Extreme value statistics of ergodic Markov processes from first passage times in the large deviation limit
• Binding kinetics of membrane-anchored receptors and ligands: molecular dynamics simulations and theory
• Specific Adhesion of Membranes: Mapping to an Effective Bond Lattice Gas
• Crack initiation in viscoelastic materials
• Fluctuation induced attraction between adhesion sites of supported membranes
• Coexistence of dilute and densely packed domains of ligand-receptor bonds in membrane adhesion
• Magnetization reversal times in the 2D Ising model
• Effective free energy for pinned membranes
• Stability of heterogeneous parallel-bond adhesion clusters under static load
• Magnetisation reversal in Ising Ferromagnet by Thermal and Field gradients

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Violation of Local Detailed Balance Despite a Clear Time-Scale Separation
• Controlling Uncertainty of Empirical First-Passage Times in the Small-Sample Regime
• Thermodynamically Consistent Phase-Field Theory Including Nearest-Neighbor Pair Correlations Explains Failure of Mean-Field Reasoning
• First-passage times in complex energy landscapes: a case study with nonmuscle myosin II assembly
• Gradient dynamics model for chemically driven running drops
• Hallmarks of Deception in Asset-Exchange Models