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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 28: Statistical Physics 5 - organized by Barbara Drossel (Darmstadt), Sabine Klapp (Berlin) and Thomas Speck (Mainz)

DY 28.4: Talk

Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 15:00–15:20, DYb

Criticality in the mechanical regulation of cell adhesion — •Kristian Blom and Aljaz Godec — Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany

Cell adhesion, the process by which cells physically attach to their environment, is established through binding of cellular adhesion molecules located at the outer cell membrane. While on the single molecule level adhesive strength is set by the intrinsic-binding affinity alone, on the many-body level an effective interaction between neighboring adhesion molecules arises through fluctuations of the anchoring cell membrane. Changes in the membrane stiffness, observed in e.g. tumor and muscle cells, alter the effective interaction strength and in turn facilitate mechanical regulation of adhesion. In this talk we will explain how mechanical regulation affects the equilibrium binding state and (un)binding kinetics of adhesion clusters. Ranging from small to large clusters, we show that there always exists an optimal membrane stiffness at which the (un)binding rates are largest. In the thermodynamic limit we observe a dynamical phase transition at which the dominant (un)binding pathway undergoes a qualitative change.

[1] K. Blom, A. Godec, arXiv:2011.05310 (2020)