Cell Motility Dependence on Adhesive Wetting

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cell shape and adhesion influence cell motility, combining modeling, analytical, and experimental approaches to reveal that increased adhesion enhances cell spreading and speed, with internal shear stress affected by cell height.

Contribution

It introduces a deformable 2D cell model linking adhesion, shape, and motility, supported by analytical and experimental validation, providing new insights into cell migration mechanics.

Findings

Increased adhesion leads to larger cell spreading and higher speeds.

Cell speed is inversely related to effective cell height.

Experimental results confirm the model's predictions.

Abstract

Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on adhesive substrates. To address how these shape changes affect cell migration and cell speed we model motility using deformable, 2D cross-sections of cells in which adhesion and frictional forces between cell and substrate can be varied separately. Our simulations show that increasing the adhesion results in increased spreading of cells and larger cell speeds. We propose an analytical model which shows that the cell speed is inversely proportional to an effective height of the cell and that increasing this height results in increased internal shear stress. The numerical and analytical results are confirmed in experiments on motile eukaryotic cells.