Time-correlated forces and biological variability in cell motility

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple model of cell motility incorporating time-correlated forces and biological variability, deriving exact analytical expressions and validating them with simulations, to better understand cell movement behavior.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel model that accounts for internal force correlations and variability, providing exact solutions and analytical descriptions of non-Gaussian displacement distributions.

Findings

Derived exact mean-squared displacement and diffusion coefficients.

Validated analytical non-Gaussian distributions with numerical simulations.

Model can describe experimental cell motility data without external signals.

Abstract

Cell motility is one of the most fundamental phenomena underlying biological processes that maintain living organisms alive. Here we introduce a simple model to describe the motility of cells which include not only time-correlated internal forces but also the biological variability which is inherent of the intra-cellular biochemical processes. Such model allow us to derive exact expressions for the mean-squared displacement and the effective time-dependent diffusion coefficient which are compared to numerical results obtained from non-markovian stochastic simulations. In addition, we show that the heterogeneity of persistence times lead to non-gaussian distributions which can be obtained analytically and that were validated by the numerical simulations. Our results indicate that such model might be used to describe the behaviour observed in experimental results obtained for isolated cells without external signaling.