Cooperative contractility: the role of stress fibres in the regulation of cell-cell junctions

Ronan, William, McMeeking, Robert M., Chen, Christopher S., McGarry, J. Patrick, & Deshpande, Vikram S. (2015). Cooperative contractility: The role of stress fibres in the regulation of cell-cell junctions. Journal of Biomechanics, 48(3), 520-528. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbiomech.2014.11.025

Abstract

We present simulations of cell-cell adhesion as reported in a recent study [Liu et al., 2010, PNAS, 107(22), 9944-9] for two cells seeded on an array of micro-posts. The micro-post array allows for the measurement of forces exerted by the cell and these show that the cell-cell tugging stress is a constant and independent of the cell-cell junction area. In the current study, we demonstrate that a material model which includes the underlying cellular processes of stress fibre contractility and adhesion formation can capture these results. The simulations explain the experimentally observed phenomena whereby the cell-cell junction forces increase with junction size but the tractions exerted by the cell on the micro-post array are independent of the junction size. Further simulations on different types of micro-post arrays and cell phenotypes are presented as a guide to future experiments. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Funder

|~|

Publisher

Elsevier

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland

cbn

Collections

Biomedical Engineering (Scholarly Articles)