Distribution of Traction Forces and Intracellular Markers Associated with Shape Changes During Amoeboid Cell Migration

TL;DR

This study investigates the cyclic shape changes and traction forces in amoeboid cell migration, analyzing molecular motor activity and intracellular markers using advanced statistical methods to understand cell motility mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of Principal Component analysis and phase-averaging to link shape dynamics with molecular motor activity during cell migration.

Findings

Shape changes are linked to periodic motility cycles.

Myosin II functions influence cell shape and force generation.

Intracellular markers correlate with motility phases.

Abstract

During migration, amoeboid cells perform a cycle of quasi-periodic repetitive events (motility cycle). the cell length and the strain energy exchanged with the substrate oscillate in time with an average frequency, f, on top of which are imposed smaller random fluctuations. the fact that a considerable portion of the changes in cell shape are due to periodic repetitive events enables the use of conditional statistics methods to analyze the network of biochemical processes involved in cell motility. taking advan- tage of this cyclic nature, we apply Principal Component analysis (PCa) and phase- average statistics to analyze the dominant modes of shape change and their association to the activity and localization of molecular motors. We analyze time-lapse measure- ments of cell shape, traction forces and fluorescence from green fluorescent protein (GfP) reporters for f-actin in Dictyostelium cells undergoing guided chemotactic migration. using wild-type cells (wt) as reference, we investigated the contractile and actin crosslinking functions of myosin II by studying myosin II heavy chain null mutant cells (mhcA-) and myosin II essential light chain null cells (mlcE-).