On the Influence of Discrete Adhesive Patterns for Cell Shape and Motility: A Computational Approach

C. Franco¹, T. Tzvetkova-Chevolleau² and A. Stéphanou^1,2

¹ Laboratoire TIMC-IMAG, Equipe DynaCell, UMR CNRS 5525, Institut d’Ingénierie et de l’Information de Santé (In3S), Pavillon Taillefer, Faculté de Médecine de Grenoble, 38706 La Tronche Cedex, France
² LTM, UMR CNRS 5129, c/o CEA Grenoble, 17 rue des martyrs, 38054 Grenoble Cedex 9, France

^* Corresponding author. E-mail: Angelique.Stephanou@imag.fr

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a computational model to investigate the coupling between cell’s adhesions and actin fibres and how this coupling affects cell shape and stability. To accomplish that, we take into account the successive stages of adhesion maturation from adhesion precursors to focal complexes and ultimately to focal adhesions, as well as the actin fibres evolution from growing filaments, to bundles and finally contractile stress fibres.

We use substrates with discrete patterns of adhesive patches, whose inter-patches distance can be modulated in order to control the location of the adhesions and the resulting fibres architecture. We then investigate the emergence of stable cell morphologies as a function of the inter-patches distance, for two different cell phenotypes generated from the model. Force generated by the stress fibres on the focal adhesions and specifically the influence of the cell contractility are also investigated.

Our results suggest that adhesion lifetime and fibre growing rate are the key parameters in the emergence of stable cell morphologies and the limiting factors for the magnitude of the mean tension force from the fibres on the focal adhesions.