2018/03/12 by Samuel Bell, Bell, Samuel, Anna-Lena Redmann +3 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemistry · #Cellular Mechanics and Interactions #FOS: Biological sciences #Microtubule and mitosis dynamics #Subcellular Processes (q-bio.SC) #thermodynamics and calorimetric analyses
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1803.04391
openalex publication_date 2018/03/12 · openalex created_date 2022/10/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
When plated onto substrates, cell morphology and even stem cell\ndifferentiation are influenced by the stiffness of their environment. Stiffer\nsubstrates give strongly spread (eventually polarized) cells with strong focal\nadhesions, and stress fibers; very soft substrates give a less developed\ncytoskeleton, and much lower cell spreading. The kinetics of this process of\ncell spreading is studied extensively, and important universal relationships\nare established on how the cell area grows with time. Here we study the\npopulation dynamics of spreading cells, investigating the characteristic\nprocesses involved in cell response to the substrate. We show that unlike the\nindividual cell morphology, this population dynamics does not depend on the\nsubstrate stiffness. Instead, a strong activation temperature dependence is\nobserved. Different cell lines on different substrates all have long-time\nstatistics controlled by the thermal activation over a single energy barrier\ndG=19 kcal/mol, while the early-time kinetics follows a power law t5. This\nimplies that the rate of spreading depends on an internal process of\nadhesion-mechanosensing complex assembly and activation: the operational\ncomplex must have 5 component proteins, and the last process in the sequence\n(which we believe is the activation of focal adhesion kinase) is controlled by\nthe binding energy dG.\n