A Cellular Potts Model of single cell migration in presence of durotaxis

Abstract

Cell migration is a fundamental biological phenomenon during which cells sense their surroundings and respond to different types of signals. In presence of durotaxis, cells preferentially crawl from soft to stiffsubstrates by reorganizing their cytoskeleton from an isotropic to an anisotropic distribution of actin fil- aments. In the present paper, we propose a Cellular Potts Model to simulate single cell migration over flat substrates with variable stiffness. We have tested five configurations: (i) a substrate including a soft and a stiffregion, (ii) a soft substrate including two parallel stiffstripes, (iii) a substrate made of succes- sive stripes with increasing stiffness to create a gradient and (iv) a stiffsubstrate with four embedded soft squares. For each simulation, we have evaluated the morphology of the cell, the distance covered, the spreading area and the migration speed. We have then compared the numerical results to specific experimental observations showing a consistent agreement.