Speaker
Description
The complex one-dimensional crawling moving patterns of a cell on a substrate are studied in this theoretical study. A simple model of cell motility, which assumes that the cell-substrate adhesion sites are localized at the cell ends, and the cell crawling dynamics are controlled by the evolution of the myosin density and the number of adhesion complexes at the cell ends, is discussed first. This model predicts that due to the coupling between the first moment of myosin density distribution and the asymmetry of the distribution of mechanosensitive adhesion complexes, a moving cell with weakly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes tends to move at constant velocity. As the mechanosensitivity of the adhesion complexes increases, a cell with sufficiently strong myosin contractile or high actin polymerization rate can exhibit stick-slip motion. Finally, a cell with highly mechanosensitive adhesion complexes exhibits periodic back-and-forth migration. The numerical solutions of an active gel model, which does not assume the localized distribution of adhesion complexes, show qualitative the same cell moving patterns. These results suggest that, in general, complex cell crawling behaviors could result from the interplay between the distribution of contractile force and mechanosensitive adhesion complexes.
