21 research outputs found
Calculation of Forces at Focal Adhesions from Elastic Substrate Data: The Effect of Localized Force and the Need for Regularization
AbstractForces exerted by stationary cells have been investigated on the level of single focal adhesions by combining elastic substrates, fluorescence labeling of focal adhesions, and the assumption of localized force when solving the inverse problem of linear elasticity theory. Data simulation confirms that the inverse problem is ill-posed in the presence of noise and shows that in general a regularization scheme is needed to arrive at a reliable force estimate. Spatial and force resolution are restricted by the smoothing action of the elastic kernel, depend on the details of the force and displacement patterns, and are estimated by data simulation. Corrections arising from the spatial distribution of force and from finite substrate size are treated in the framework of a force multipolar expansion. Our method is computationally cheap and could be used to study mechanical activity of cells in real time
High Magnetic Field Microwave Conductivity of 2D Electrons in an Array of Antidots
We measure the high magnetic field () microwave conductivity,
Re, of a high mobility 2D electron system containing an antidot
array. Re vs frequency () increases strongly in the regime of
the fractional quantum Hall effect series, with Landau filling .
At microwave , Re vs exhibits a broad peak centered around
. On the peak, the 10 GHz Re can exceed its dc-limit
value by a factor of 5. This enhanced microwave conductivity is unobservable
for temperature K, and grows more pronounced as is
decreased. The effect may be due to excitations supported by the antidot edges,
but different from the well-known edge magnetoplasmons.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, revtex
Elastic interactions of active cells with soft materials
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of
the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information
to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,
cellular force patterns during active mechanosensing can be modelled as
anisotropic force contraction dipoles. Their build-up depends on the mechanical
properties of the environment, including elastic rigidity and prestrain. In a
finite sized sample, it also depends on sample geometry and boundary conditions
through image strain fields. We discuss the interactions of active cells with
an elastic environment and compare it to the case of physical force dipoles.
Despite marked differences, both cases can be described in the same theoretical
framework. We exactly solve the elastic equations for anisotropic force
contraction dipoles in different geometries (full space, halfspace and sphere)
and with different boundary conditions. These results are then used to predict
optimal position and orientation of mechanosensing cells in soft material.Comment: Revtex, 38 pages, 8 Postscript files included; revised version,
accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
TRACTION PATTERNS OF TUMOR CELLS
International audienceThe traction exerted by a cell on a planar deformable substrate can be in- directly obtained on the basis of the displacement field of the underlying layer. The usual methodology used to address this inverse problem is based on the exploitation of the Green tensor of the linear elasticity problem in a half space (Boussinesq problem), coupled with a minimization algorithm under force penalization. A possible alternative strategy is to exploit an adjoint equation, obtained on the basis of a suitable minimiza- tion requirement. The resulting system of coupled elliptic partial differential equations is applied here to determine the force field per unit surface generated by T24 tumor cells on a polyacrylamide substrate. The shear stress obtained by numerical integration provides quantitative insight of the traction field and is a promising tool to investigate the spatial pattern of force per unit surface generated in cell motion, particularly in the case of such cancer cells