Contact guidance as a consequence of coupled morphological evolution and motility of adherent cells

Adherent cells seeded on substrates spread and evolve their morphology while simultaneously displaying motility. Phenomena such as contact guidance, viz. the alignment of cells on patterned substrates, are strongly linked to the coupling of morphological evolution with motility. Here, we employ a recently developed statistical thermodynamics framework for modelling the non-thermal fluctuating response of cells to probe this coupling. This thermodynamic framework is first extended via a Langevin style model to predict temporal responses of cells to unpatterned and patterned substrates. The Langevin model is then shown to not only predict the different experimentally observed temporal scales for morphological observables such as cell area and elongation but also the interplay of morphology with motility that ultimately leads to contact guidance. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10237-022-01570-9.