Abstract
Changes in mechanical stimuli and the physiological environment are sensed by the cell. Thesechanges influence the cell’s motility patterns. The cell’s directional migration is dependent on the substrate stiffness. To describe such behavior of a cell, a tensegrity model was used. Cells with an extended lamellipodium were modeled. The internal elastic strain energy of a cell attached to the substrates with different stiffnesses was evaluated. The obtained results show that on the stiffer substrate, the elastic strain energy of the cell adherent to this substrate decreases. Therefore, the substrate stiffness is one of the parameters that govern the cell’s directional movement.
Highlights
A single cell migration is an important component of many biological events
The current study aims to find the internal elastic strain energy of a cytoskeleton, its nucleus, and the lamellipodium of a 3T3 cell for a range of the substrate stiffness values
The current study aims to find the internal elastic strain the stiffness it energy of a cytoskeleton, its and lamellipodium of a 3T3 cell for rangeelements of the substrate
Summary
A single cell migration is an important component of many biological events. It may be initiated by number of various factors, such as mechanical [1] (mechanotaxis), electrical [2] (galvanotaxis), thermal [3] (thermotaxis), topological [4,5] (topotaxis) and chemical [6] (chemotaxis). This process is dependent on the assumption that a cell is capable of probing the stiffness of the substrate it is adherent to and respond to it by applying contractile forces. I.e., the substrate’s stiffness, cells can guide their activities that will lead to changes in the morphologies and direction of migration. A tensegrity structure can represent these features As it was mentioned above [1,2,3,4,5,6], there are number of factors influencing a cell migration, the current work only examines the effect of the substrate’s mechanical properties (stiffness) on cell migration. A tensegrity structure was used to model the cell–substrate interaction to explain the dependency of the cell’s motility on the stiffness of the substrate.
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