Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 10: Postersession II

BP 10.40: Poster

Monday, March 12, 2018, 17:30–19:30, Poster C

Phase field modeling of moving cells - shedding light on the motility onset — Cody Reeves^1,2, Benjamin Winkler³, Igor Aranson^2,4, and •Falko Ziebert^5,3 — ¹Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA — ²Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, USA — ³Physikalisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany — ⁴Department of Biomedical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA — ⁵Institute for Theoretical Physics, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Germany

Substrate-based crawling motility of eukaryotic cells is essential for many biological functions, both in developing and mature organisms. Although a comprehensive understanding remains elusive, progress has been achieved recently in its modelling on the whole-cell level. We survey the recent advances made by employing the phase field approach, a powerful method to implement moving, deformable boundaries. The developed approach in addition is modular in the sense that, depending on the problem at hand, different model components (e.g. adhesion dynamics, substrate deformation and membrane feedback) can be included or disregarded without changing the formalism. We exemplify the approach by showing that our framework captures the spontaneous rotational states prior to the cell motility onset and cell polarization, recently found for keratocytes by two groups (S. Lou et al. JCB 2015; F. Raynaud et al. Nature Phys. 2016), and interpret them as nonlinear shape deformation waves.