A simple model for dynamic phase transitions in cell spreading

Abstract

There are some interesting experimental results on cell spreading at macroscopic scales (cell size) where people have observed various dynamic phases in terms of rate of spreading of area of adherence to the substrate. In the present paper, we develop a very simple phenomenological model to capture those apparent dynamic phases of a spreading cell without going into the microscopic details of actin polymerization which is the main driving force for such processes. Our conclusion is that the dynamic phases of cell spreading depend on some gross parameters of the cell rather than on complex signalling pathways