Traction forces of cancer cells

Actes du congrès de la société de BiomécaniqueInternational audienceCell motility of cancer cells is a fundamental problem, and requires precise correlation between cell adhesive and rheological properties. The migration of cancer cells is studied in two dimensions, as cells are seeded onto functionnalized polyacrylamide gels. They migrate by developping focal adhesion sites and modulate their cytoskeleton dynamics by regulating actin and myosin. This research aims at understanding the forces developped by different cancer cells of moderate to high invasiveness in order to investigate their contractility as well as the adhesion molecules necessary for cell migration

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