Quantifying active and resistive stresses in adherent cells

To understand cell migration, it is crucial to gain knowledge on how cells exert and integrate forces on and from their environment. A quantity of prime interest for biophysicists interested in cell movements modeling is the intracellular stresses. Up to now, three different methods have been proposed to calculate it, they are all in the regime of the thin plate approximation. Two are based on solving the mechanical equilibrium equation inside the cell material (monolayer stress microscopy and Bayesian inference stress microscopy) and one is based on the continuity of displacement at the cell-substrate interface (intracellular stress microscopy). We show here using 3D FEM modeling that these techniques do not calculate the same quantities (as was previously assumed), the first techniques calculate the sum of the active and resistive stresses within the cell, whereas the last one only calculates the resistive component. Combining these techniques should, in principle, permit access to the active stress alone.

Automated summary

To understand cell migration, it is crucial to understand how cells exert and integrate forces from their environment. Biophysicists have proposed three different methods to calculate intracellular stresses, all based on the thin plate approximation. However, these techniques do not calculate the same quantities and combining them allows access to the active stress alone.