Berlin 2015 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 36: Cell adhesion, mechanics and migration II
BP 36.12: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 18. März 2015, 18:15–18:30, H 1058
Polarization of motile amoeboid cells under confinement — •Oliver Nagel1, Can Guven2, Matthias Theves1, Megan Driscoll2, Wolfgang Losert2, and Carsten Beta1 — 1Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, Germany — 2Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
The typical environment of motile eukaryotic cells, like leukocytes, cancer cells, and amoeba, is dominated by the narrow interstitial spacings of tissue or soil. While most of our knowledge of actin-driven eukaryotic motility is based on cells that move on planar open surfaces, recent work has demonstrated that confinement can lead to strongly altered motile behavior. Our experiments show that motile amoeboid cells undergo a spontaneous symmetry breaking under confinement. Cells inside narrow channels switch to a highly persistent, unidirectional mode of motion, moving at a constant speed along the channel. They remain in contact with the two opposing channel side walls and alternate protrusions of their leading edge near each wall. The actin cytoskeleton of the cells exhibits a characteristic arrangement that is dominated by dense, stationary actin foci at the side walls, together with less dense dynamic regions at the leading edge. Our experimental findings can be explained based on an excitable network model that accounts for the confinement-induced symmetry breaking and correctly recovers the spatio-temporal pattern of protrusions at the leading edge.