Contour models of cellular adhesion

TL;DR

Contour models of cellular adhesion provide a simplified yet insightful theoretical framework to understand how cells interact mechanically with their environment, linking cell shape, forces, and cytoskeletal properties.

Contribution

This paper offers a comprehensive overview of contour models, highlighting their ability to predict cell shape and traction forces based on internal stresses and membrane mechanics.

Findings

Contour models can explicitly determine cell edge shape.

They can calculate traction forces from internal stresses.

Models incorporate effects of bending elasticity and cytoskeletal anisotropy.

Abstract

The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates. Simultaneously, this has created the demand for a theoretical framework able to decipher the experimental observations, shed light on the complex biomechanical processes that govern the interaction between the cell and the extracellular matrix and offer testable predictions. Contour models of cellular adhesion, represent one of the simplest and yet most insightful approach in this problem. Rooted in the paradigm of active matter, these models allow to explicitly determine the shape of the cell edge and calculate the traction forces experienced by the substrate, starting from the internal and peripheral contractile stresses as well as the passive restoring forces and bending moments arising within the actin cortex and the plasma membrane. In this chapter I provide a general overview of contour models of cellular adhesion and review the specific cases of cells equipped with isotropic and anisotropic actin cytoskeleton as well as the role of bending elasticity.