TY - JOUR
T1 - Physical constraints on accuracy and persistence during breast cancer cell chemotaxis
AU - Varennes, Julien
AU - Moon, Hye ran
AU - Saha, Soutick
AU - Mugler, Andrew
AU - Han, Bumsoo
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Varennes et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Directed cell motion in response to an external chemical gradient occurs in many biological phenomena such as wound healing, angiogenesis, and cancer metastasis. Chemotaxis is often characterized by the accuracy, persistence, and speed of cell motion, but whether any of these quantities is physically constrained by the others is poorly understood. Using a combination of theory, simulations, and 3D chemotaxis assays on single metastatic breast cancer cells, we investigate the links among these different aspects of chemotactic performance. In particular, we observe in both experiments and simulations that the chemotactic accuracy, but not the persistence or speed, increases with the gradient strength. We use a random walk model to explain this result and to propose that cells’ chemotactic accuracy and persistence are mutually constrained. Our results suggest that key aspects of chemotactic performance are inherently limited regardless of how favorable the environmental conditions are.
AB - Directed cell motion in response to an external chemical gradient occurs in many biological phenomena such as wound healing, angiogenesis, and cancer metastasis. Chemotaxis is often characterized by the accuracy, persistence, and speed of cell motion, but whether any of these quantities is physically constrained by the others is poorly understood. Using a combination of theory, simulations, and 3D chemotaxis assays on single metastatic breast cancer cells, we investigate the links among these different aspects of chemotactic performance. In particular, we observe in both experiments and simulations that the chemotactic accuracy, but not the persistence or speed, increases with the gradient strength. We use a random walk model to explain this result and to propose that cells’ chemotactic accuracy and persistence are mutually constrained. Our results suggest that key aspects of chemotactic performance are inherently limited regardless of how favorable the environmental conditions are.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006961
DO - 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006961
M3 - Article
C2 - 30970018
AN - SCOPUS:85065112833
SN - 1553-734X
VL - 15
JO - PLoS computational biology
JF - PLoS computational biology
IS - 4
M1 - e1006961
ER -