Dynamics of cell area and force during spreading

Yifat Brill-Karniely, Noam Nisenholz, Kavitha Rajendran, Quynh Dang, Ramaswamy Krishnan, Assaf Zemel*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Experiments on human pulmonary artery endothelial cells are presented to show that cell area and the force exerted on a substrate increase simultaneously, but with different rates during spreading; rapid-force increase systematically occurred several minutes past initial spreading. We examine this theoretically and present three complementary mechanisms that may accompany the development of lamellar stress during spreading and underlie the observed behavior. These include: 1), the dynamics of cytoskeleton assembly at the cell basis; 2), the strengthening of acto-myosin forces in response to the generated lamellar stresses; and 3), the passive strain-stiffening of the cytoskeleton.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)L37-L40
JournalBiophysical Journal
Volume107
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - 16 Dec 2014

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Biophysical Society.

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