Universal Kinetics of the Onset of Cell Spreading on Substrates of Different Stiffness.
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Publication Date
2019-02Journal Title
Biophysical journal
ISSN
0006-3495
Publisher
Elsevier
Volume
116
Issue
3
Pages
551-559
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Physical Medium
Print-Electronic
Metadata
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Bell, S., Redmann, A., & Terentjev, E. (2019). Universal Kinetics of the Onset of Cell Spreading on Substrates of Different Stiffness.. Biophysical journal, 116 (3), 551-559. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2018.12.020
Abstract
When plated onto substrates, cell morphology and even stem cell differentiation are influenced by the stiffness of their environment. Stiffer substrates give strongly spread (eventually polarized) cells with strong focal adhesions, and stress fibers; very soft substrates give a less developed cytoskeleton, and much lower cell spreading. The kinetics of this process of cell spreading is studied extensively, and important universal relationships are established on how the cell area grows with time. Here we study the population dynamics of spreading cells, investigating the characteristic processes involved in cell response
to the substrate. We show that unlike the individual cell morphology, this population dynamics does not depend on the substrate stiffness. Instead, a strong activation temperature dependence is observed. Different cell lines on different substrates all have long-time statistics controlled by the thermal activation over a single energy barrier ΔG = 18 kcal/mol, while the
early-time kinetics follows a power law t^5. This implies that the rate of spreading depends on an internal process of adhesion complex assembly and activation: the operational complex must have 5 component proteins, and the last process in the sequence (which we believe is the activation of focal adhesion kinase) is controlled by the binding energy ΔG.
Keywords
NIH 3T3 Cells, Animals, Mice, Cell Size, Kinetics, Mechanical Phenomena, Biomechanical Phenomena
Sponsorship
This work has been funded by EPSRC (grants EP/M508007/1 and EP/J017639), and the Ernest Oppenheimer Trust in Cambridge.
Funder references
EPSRC (EP/J017639/1)
EPSRC (EP/M508007/1)
EPSRC (1641841)
EPSRC (1641841)
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2018.12.020
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/288653