Contact guidance persists under myosin inhibition due to the local alignment of adhesions and individual protrusions

Contact guidance—cell polarization by anisotropic substrate features—is integral to numerous physiological processes; however the complexities of its regulation are only beginning to be discovered. In particular, cells polarize to anisotropic features under non-muscle myosin II (MII) inhibition, despite MII ordinarily being essential for polarized cell migration. Here, we investigate the ability of cells to sense and respond to fiber alignment in the absence of MII activity. We find that contact guidance is determined at the level of individual protrusions, which are individually guided by local fiber orientation, independent of MII. Protrusion stability and persistence are functions of adhesion lifetime, which depends on fiber orientation. Under MII inhibition, adhesion lifetime no longer depends on fiber orientation; however the ability of protrusions to form closely spaced adhesions sequentially without having to skip over gaps in adhesive area, biases protrusion formation along fibers. The co-alignment of multiple protrusions polarizes the entire cell; if the fibers are not aligned, contact guidance of individual protrusions still occurs, but does not produce overall cell polarization. These results describe how aligned features polarize a cell independently of MII and demonstrate how cellular contact guidance is built on the local alignment of adhesions and individual protrusions.