Journal
JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE
Volume 9, Issue 70, Pages 1084-1092Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2011.0433
Keywords
cell motility; actin self-assembly; nonlinear physics
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Funding
- DFG [IRTG 1642]
- KAUST
- University of Oxford
- DDRE and AFOSR [FA9550-10-1-0167]
- CNRS
- U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Science and Engineering [DE-AC02-06CH11357]
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Computational modelling of cell motility on substrates is a formidable challenge; regulatory pathways are intertwined and forces that influence cell motion are not fully quantified. Additional challenges arise from the need to describe a moving deformable cell boundary. Here, we present a simple mathematical model coupling cell shape dynamics, treated by the phase-field approach, to a vector field describing the mean orientation (polarization) of the actin filament network. The model successfully reproduces the primary phenomenology of cell motility: discontinuous onset of motion, diversity of cell shapes and shape oscillations. The results are in qualitative agreement with recent experiments on motility of keratocyte cells and cell fragments. The asymmetry of the shapes is captured to a large extent in this simple model, which may prove useful for the interpretation of experiments.
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