Cell motion as a stochastic process controlled by focal contacts dynamics

Abstract

Directed cell motion is essential in physiological and pathological processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer spreading. Chemotaxis has often been proposed as the driving mechanism, even though evidence of long-range gradients is often lacking in vivo. By patterning adhesive regions in space, we control cell shape and the associated potential to move along one direction in another mode of migration coined ratchetaxis. We report that focal contacts distributions collectively dictate cell directionality, and bias is non-linearly increased by gap distance between adhesive regions. Focal contact dynamics on micro-patterns allow to integrate these phenomena in a consistent model where each focal contact can be translated into a force with known amplitude and direction, leading to quantitative predictions for cell motion in every condition. Altogether, our study shows how local and minutes timescale dynamics of focal adhesions and their distribution lead to long term cellular motion with simple geometric rules.

Ratchetaxisin channels: cells move directionally by pushing walls asymmetrically

“…Defects in these structures and their implications in motility in confined spaces have not been reported. It is also not clear if the broken symmetry given by bottlenecks could direct cell motion as it has been shown previously with other configurations by ratchetaxis (14-20). In this work, we show that periodic asymmetries direct cell motion when cells are confined in open channels.…”