Regensburg 2007 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 9: Statistical physics in biological systems
DY 9.1: Talk
Monday, March 26, 2007, 16:30–16:45, H3
Anomalous diffusion of migrating biological cells — Peter Dieterich1, •Rainer Klages2, Roland Preuss3, and Albrecht Schwab4 — 1Institut für Physiologie, Medizinische Fakultät Carl Gustav Carus, Dresden, Germany — 2School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, UK — 3Center for Interdisciplinary Plasma Science, Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany — 4Institut für Physiologie II, Münster, Germany
Cell migration is a complex dynamical process resulting from an intricate interplay of multiple components of the cellular migration machinery. Our work starts from the experimental observation of single cells moving on substrates. At first view, their paths look like the ones of Brownian particles. However, a detailed data analysis reveals a superdiffusive increase of the long-time mean squared displacement, non-Gaussian probability distributions for the cell positions and power law decays of velocity autocorrelations. This dynamics includes intermittent features resembling the one of foraging animals. On long time scales, all of our experimental data matches to a modeling of anomalous diffusion in terms of a fractional Klein-Kramers equation.