Cell motility as an energy minimization process

TL;DR

This paper models cell motility as an active phase transition driven by a quasi-potential, providing insights into how molecular motor interactions influence cell movement and stability.

Contribution

It introduces a continuum active gel model with a quasi-potential to describe collective motor-driven cell motility as a phase transition.

Findings

Cell motility can be understood as an active phase transition.

Static and motile states can coexist metastably.

Stochastic disorder can trigger intermittent cell dynamics.

Abstract

The dynamics of active matter driven by interacting molecular motors has a non-potential structure at the local scale. However, we show that there exists a quasi-potential effectively describing the collective self-organization of the motors propelling a cell at a continuum active gel level. Such a model allows us to understand cell motility as an active phase transition problem between the static and motile steady state configurations that minimize the quasi-potential. In particular both configurations can coexist in a metastable fashion and a small stochastic disorder in the gel is sufficient to trigger an intermittent cell dynamics where either static or motile phases are more probable, depending on which state is the global minimum of the quasi-potential.