Regensburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 49: Posters - Cell Mechanics and Migration & Physics of Cancer

BP 49.17: Poster

Mittwoch, 9. März 2016, 17:00–19:00, Poster C

Controlling and multiscale modelling of contractility in adherent cells — •Dimitri Probst¹, Christoph A. Brand¹, Marco Linke¹, Patrick W. Oakes², Elizabeth Wagner³, Michael Glotzer³, Margaret L. Gardel², and Ulrich S. Schwarz¹ — ¹Institute for Theoretical Physics and BioQuant, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany — ²Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, James Franck Institute and the Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA — ³Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA

Cell contractility is coordinated inside the cell mainly by the spatial regulation of RhoA activity, a protein which in its active form is known to promote both growth of actin filaments and their contraction through myosin II molecular motors. For adherent cells, this usually leads to the formation of so-called stress fibers, which are condensed bundles of actin filaments contracted by myosin II minifilaments. In order to attain a theoretical understanding of the cytoskeletal reorganization during phases of RhoA-activity, we have developed a discrete viscoelastic cable network model which can well reproduce the spatiotemporal properties of the actomyosin system. We show how the addition of stress fibers, represented as additional elastic links in the network, changes the overall behaviour of the simulated cytoskeleton from Maxwell-type to Kelvin-Voigt-type. We show that, by means of discrete homogenization, the parameters of the discrete cytoskeleton model can be directly mapped to the macroscopic quantities of a viscoelastic continuum model.