Getting in shape and swimming: the role of cortical forces and membrane heterogeneity in eukaryotic cells

DOI10.1007/S00285-018-1223-0zbMATH Open1410.35143arXiv1710.01618OpenAlexW3099523096WikidataQ52685636 ScholiaQ52685636MaRDI QIDQ667693FDOQ667693

Juan-Miguel Gracia

Publication date: 1 March 2019

Published in: Journal of Mathematical Biology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve movement by blebbing or other cyclic shape changes, and both highlysimplified and more realistic models of these modes have been studied previously. Herein we study swimming that is driven by membrane tension gradients that arise from flows in the actin cortex underlying the membrane, and does not involve imposed cyclic shape changes. Such gradients can lead to a number of different characteristic cell shapes, and our first objective is to understand how different distributions of membrane tension influence the shape of cells in an inviscid quiescent fluid. We then analyze the effects of spatial variation in other membrane properties, and how they interact with tension gradients to determine the shape. We also study the effect of fluid--cell interactions and show how tension leads to cell movement, how the balance between tension gradients and a variable bending modulus determine the shape and direction of movement, and how the efficiency of movement depends on the properties of the fluid and the distribution of tension and bending modulus in the membrane.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.01618

Recommendations

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zbMATH Keywords

boundary integral methodlow Reynolds number swimmingself-propulsionheterogeneous membranemembrane tension gradients

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

PDEs in connection with fluid mechanics (35Q35) Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible viscous fluids (76D05) PDEs in connection with biology, chemistry and other natural sciences (35Q92) Optimization of shapes other than minimal surfaces (49Q10) Variational principles of physics (49S05) Finite difference methods for initial value and initial-boundary value problems involving PDEs (65M06) Differential geometric methods (tensors, connections, symplectic, Poisson, contact, Riemannian, nonholonomic, etc.) for problems in mechanics (70G45) Capillarity (surface tension) for incompressible inviscid fluids (76B45) Stokes and related (Oseen, etc.) flows (76D07) Biomechanics (92C10) Boundary element methods for initial value and initial-boundary value problems involving PDEs (65M38)

Cites Work

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Cited In (3)

• The effects of internal forces and membrane heterogeneity on three-dimensional cell shapes
• The influence of nucleus mechanics in modelling adhesion-independent cell migration in structured and confined environments
• Multiscale phenomena and patterns in biological systems: special issue in honour of Hans Othmer

Uses Software

• BEMLIB
• FELICITY
• GitHub

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