​One day workshop on Mechanobiology

Mechanics of cell crawling.

                     P. Recho

Two main active processes allowing cells to crawl are myosin contraction and actin polymerization. We first show that these two mechanisms are complimentary allowing cells to handle fundamentally different tasks as pushing and pulling. Then we focus on contraction dominated crawling involved, for instance, in motility initiation, and show that this mechanism ensures an almost optimal trade off between efficiency and cost.