Dresden 2020 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 18: Poster VI

BP 18.20: Poster

Tuesday, March 17, 2020, 14:00–16:00, P2/2OG

Spatio-temporal characteristics of eukaryotic single-cell motility on fibronectin coated micro-lanes — •Johannes Heyn, Christoph Schreiber, and Joachim Rädler — Faculty of Physics and Center for NanoScience, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, D-80539 Munich, Germany

Studying cell migration in naturally occurring environments, such as metastasising cancer in cell tissue or stem cells during embryonic development, proves immensely complex from an experimental point of view. Additionally, the external cues of the complex environment makes it difficult to develop a consistent mathematical description of the cell trajectories. To simplify the system, we constrain single cells to a quasi-one-dimensional migration by using micropatterned substrates that only allow cell movement along a fibronectin coated lane. The defined geometry facilitates quantitative read-out of locomotion, allows for large number statistics and simplifies theoretical models. In order to capture all relevant timescales of cell migration we observe cells for several days with a time-resolution in the order of seconds. From this we extract the memory kernel for a generalised Langevin equation approach. By comparing memory kernels, we are able to discriminate between different cell lines. In the next step we are interested in how external cues influence the characteristic memory kernels of cells. In particular, chemical gradients can be studied to get a better understanding of the cell migration process and its dependence on the microenvironment.