Coupling biochemistry and mechanics in cell adhesion: a model for inhomogeneous stress fiber contraction

By A. Besser, Ulrich S. Schwarz. 2007

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Biochemistry and mechanics are closely coupled in cell adhesion. At sites of cell-matrix adhesion, mechanical force triggers signaling through the Rho-pathway, which leads to structural reinforcement and increased contractility in the actin cytoskeleton. The resulting force acts back to the sites of adhesion, resulting in a positive feedback loop for mature adhesion. Here, we model this biochemical–mechanical feedback loop for the special case when the actin cytoskeleton is organized in stress fibers, which are contractile bundles of actin filaments. Activation of myosin II molecular motors through the Rho-pathway is described by a system of reaction–diffusion equations, which are coupled into a viscoelastic model for a contractile actin bundle. We find strong spatial gradients in the activation of contractility and in the corresponding deformation pattern of the stress fiber, in good agreement with experimental findings.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Cell Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b40b684dd80f53e9217b0d74119711fc39b0066

How researchers see this paper

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Debashish Chowdhury
2. Shmuel Safran
3. Ulrich S. Schwarz

In Cell Biology

1. Debashish Chowdhury
2. Ulrich S. Schwarz
3. Shmuel Safran

Citations in the corpus

• Stochastic mechano-chemical kinetics of molecular motors: A multidisciplinary enterprise from a physicist’s perspective (2012, background): “One of the main predictions of this theoretical model is a heterogeneous contraction of the stress fibers; this result is consistent with experiments [892].”
• Physics of adherent cells (2013, background): “, 2012) and couple elastic, viscous, and contractile elements in a unit cell (Besser and Schwarz, 2007; Luo et al., 2008; Stachowiak, Matthew and O’Shaughnessy, 2008, 2009; Russell et al., 2009; Besser et al., 2011).”