Auto-regulation of cell morphology during cell migration: exploration using computational modeling

摘要

Cell migration plays an important role in many biological processes including development, morphogenesis and pathological conditions like cancer invasion. Cell shows drastic changes in cell morphology and cell size during directed-migration as well as random migration. While understanding the mechanism through which a cell controls its shape/size can play a significant role in improving our understanding of biological systems, the involvement of multiple length/time scales make the experimental exploration of the mechanism very difficult. In the past few decades, control theoretic approaches/tools have proven to be a great facilitator of study and development of cell biology. In this study, we present a simple spring-bead model of a cell to study it's shape and size dynamics during cell migration. The model incorporates the effect of plasma membrane tension, internal pressure and chemoattractant forces on the cell dynamics. In spite of having a significantly lesser number of model parameters, our model recapitulates many features of a real cell including cell polarization, cell cringing, steering, gradient sensing and directed migration. Present work demonstrates cell shape and size dynamics in the presence of external signals such as chemotaxis.