On Mechanical Modeling of Dynamic Changes in the Structure and Properties of Adherent Cells

Abstract

Over the past two decades, significant information has become available that reveals the fundamental role of mechanical factors in controlling the complex structure and function of many cell types. There is a pressing need, however, to synthesize these many observations via mathematical models, which have predictive capability and which suggest experiments that will provide increased insight and thus refinement of the models. In this paper, it is suggested that some of the salient mechanical behaviors exhibited by cells, including dynamic mechanosensitive changes therein, can be described using a simple constrained mixture model that has recently been proposed for describing tissue-level growth and remodeling. That is, strong similarities in structure-function relationships at multiple length scales—cell, tissue, and organ—may allow us to exploit common constitutive frameworks, which may prove advantageous in future attempts to model across the various scales.