On the importance of substrate deformations for cell migration

Cell migration is essential for many biological processes such as tissue morphogenesis, wound healing or metastatic invasion in cancer. It is a complex and highly regulated phenomena closely guided and fine-tuned by both chemical and mechanical cues. Whereas chemoattraction has been extensively studied, the mechanical influence remains to be fully elucidated. Although cell sensitivity to the substrate rigidity is known under the term durotaxis [Marzban et al.2018] and substrate anisotropy is known to influence cellular organization [Checa et al. 2015] much less is known about cell sensitivity to environmental stresses and strains. This paper proposes to specifically focus on the cell sensitivity to substrate deformations during migration. Those are assumed to play a role in longrange cell-cell interactions [Han et al. 2018] by which a cell deforms the substrate [Tanimoto et al. 2014] and influences the orientation of migration of other cells in its neighbourhood. This form of mechanotaxis (to which we will refer as strain mechanosensing) could in particular explain how cells migrate towards each other to form vascular loops during angiogenesis whenchemotaxis is ruled out in a chemically saturated tissue