IPLS/BioP Seminar: Prof. Kees Storm (TU Eindhoven)

Abstract: Single cells migrating along a 2D substrate with uniform mechanical properties generally execute a so-called persistent random walk (PRW). That is, while their overall motion is nondirectional they do tend to continue along a given direction for some amount of time - the persistence time. Interestingly, this persistence time may vary with the substrate's rigidity: On stiffer substrates, cellular persistence may be three times greater than on softer substrates. In recent work, we showed that this relation between stiffness and persistence, alone, leads to durotaxis: a soft-to-stiff gradient on the substrate will, without further assumptions, drive a flux of cells and transport them in the direction of increasing stiffness. I will briefly explain this phenomenon, contrast it to the biased transport that occurs, for instance, in chemotaxis, and will show that persistence-based durotaxis may be used to design stiffness 'landscapes' that can instruct cell transport on 2D substrates. Moving beyond single-cell motility, I present recent results on durotaxis in clusters of collectively moving cells, and show that collective durotaxis is cluster-size dependent.