A Cellular Potts energy-based approach to analyse the influence of the surface topography on single cell motility

Abstract

cellular scale level, the cell behaviour, especially its migration, is affected by the specificities of the surfaceof the substrate, such as the stiffness of the surface and its roughness topography. The latter has beenshown to have a great impact on various cell mechanisms, such as the cell adhesion, migration, or proliferation.In fact, the mere presence of micro roughness leads to an improvement of those mechanisms,with a better integration of the implants. However, the phenomena behind those improvements are stillnot clear.In this paper, we propose a three-dimensional (3D) model of a single cell migration using a CellularPotts (CP) model to study the influence of the surface topography on cell motility. To do so, various configurationswere tested, such as: (i) a substrate with a random roughness, (ii) a substrate with a rectangulargroove pattern (parallel and perpendicular to the direction of motion), (ii) a substrate with asinusoidal groove pattern. To evaluate the influence of the surface topography on cell motility, for eachconfiguration, the cell speed and shape as well as the contact surface between the cell and the substratehave been quantified.Our numerical results demonstrate that, in agreement with the experimental observations of the literature,the substrate topography has an influence on the cell efficiency (i.e. cell speed), orientation andshape. Besides, we also show that the increase of the contact surface alone in presence of roughness isnot enough to explain the improvement of cell migration on the various rough surfaces. Finally, we highlightthe importance of the roughness dimension on cell motility. This could be a critical aspect to considerfor further analyses and applications, such as surface treatments for medical applications.