Title:
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Modeling random crawling, membrane deformation and intracellular polarity of motile amoeboid cells
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Author:
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Alonso Muñoz, Sergio; Stange, Maike; Beta, Carsten
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Other authors:
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Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament de Física; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. BIOCOM-SC - Grup de Biologia Computacional i Sistemes Complexos |
Abstract:
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Amoeboid movement is one of the most widespread forms of cell motility that plays a key
role in numerous biological contexts. While many aspects of this process are well investigated,
the large cell-to-cell variability in the motile characteristics of an otherwise uniform
population remains an open question that was largely ignored by previous models. In this
article, we present a mathematical model of amoeboid motility that combines noisy bistable
kinetics with a dynamic phase field for the cell shape. To capture cell-to-cell variability, we
introduce a single parameter for tuning the balance between polarity formation and intracellular
noise. We compare numerical simulations of our model to experiments with the social
amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Despite the simple structure of our model, we found
close agreement with the experimental results for the center-of-mass motion as well as for
the evolution of the cell shape and the overall intracellular patterns. We thus conjecture that
the building blocks of our model capture essential features of amoeboid motility and may
serve as a starting point for more detailed descriptions of cell motion in chemical gradients
and confined environments. |
Abstract:
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Peer Reviewed |
Subject(s):
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-Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Matemàtiques i estadística::Matemàtica aplicada a les ciències -Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Matemàtiques i estadística -Cell membranes -Random variables -Membranes cel·lulars -Variables aleatòries |
Rights:
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Spain
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ |
Document type:
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Article - Published version Article |
Published by:
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Public Library of Science (PLOS)
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