soft matrices suppress cooperative behaviors among receptor-ligand bonds in cell adhesion软矩阵抑制细胞粘附receptor-ligand债券之间的合作行为.pdfVIP

Soft Matrices Suppress Cooperative Behaviors among Receptor-Ligand Bonds in Cell Adhesion ¤ Jin Qian , Huajian Gao* School of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States of America Abstract The fact that biological tissues are stable over prolonged periods of time while individual receptor-ligand bonds only have limited lifetime underscores the critical importance of cooperative behaviors of multiple molecular bonds, in particular the competition between the rate of rupture of closed bonds (death rate) and the rate of rebinding of open bonds (birth rate) in a bond cluster. We have recently shown that soft matrices can greatly increase the death rate in a bond cluster by inducing severe stress concentration near the adhesion edges. In the present paper, we report a more striking effect that, irrespective of stress concentration, soft matrices also suppress the birth rate in a bond cluster by increasing the local separation distance between open bonds. This is shown by theoretical analysis as well as Monte Carlo simulations based on a stochastic-elasticity model in which stochastic descriptions of molecular bonds and elastic descriptions of interfacial force/ separation are unified in a single modeling framework. Our findings not only are important for understanding the role of elastic matrices in cell adhesion, but also have general implications on adhesion between soft materials. Citation: Qian J, Gao H (2010) Soft Matrices Suppress Cooperative Behaviors among Receptor-Ligand Bonds in Cell Adhesion. PLoS ONE 5(8): e12342. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012342 Editor: Markus J. Buehler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States of America Received July 11, 2010; Accepted July 30, 2010; Published August 23, 2010 Copyright: 2010 Qian, Gao. This is an open-access article d