A Diffuse Interface Model for Cell Blebbing Including Membrane-Cortex Coupling with Linker Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a diffuse interface model for cell blebbing that incorporates membrane-cortex interactions and linker protein dynamics, enabling accurate simulation of bleb formation and other mechanical effects.

Contribution

It presents a novel two-phase field model that includes linker protein dynamics, improving the ability to simulate cell blebbing phenomena.

Findings

Reproduces bleb formation by cortex rupture

Demonstrates the importance of linker proteins in blebbing

Provides a computational scheme for detailed cell mechanics simulations

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop suitable models for the phenomenon of cell blebbing, which allow for computational predictions of mechanical effects including the crucial interaction of the cell membrane and the actin cortex. For this sake we resort to a two phase-field model that uses diffuse descriptions of both the membrane and the cortex, which in particular allows for a suitable description of the interaction via linker protein densities. Besides the detailed modelling we discuss some energetic aspects of the models and present a numerical scheme, which allows to carry out several computational studies. In those we demonstrate that several effects found in experiments can be reproduced, in particular bleb formation by cortex rupture, which was not possible by previous models without the linker dynamics.