TY - JOUR T1 - Cell motion as a stochastic process controlled by focal contacts dynamics JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/750331 SP - 750331 AU - Simon Lo Vecchio AU - Raghavan Thiagarajan AU - David Caballero AU - Vincent Vigon AU - Laurent Navoret AU - Raphaƫl Voituriez AU - Daniel Riveline Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/30/750331.abstract N2 - Directed cell motion is essential in physiological and pathological processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer spreading. Chemotaxis has often been proposed as the driving mechanism, even though evidence of long-range gradients is often lacking in vivo. By patterning adhesive regions in space, we control cell shape and the associated potential to move along one direction in another mode of migration coined ratchetaxis. We report that focal contacts distributions collectively dictate cell directionality, and bias is non-linearly increased by gap distance between adhesive regions. Focal contact dynamics on micro-patterns allow to integrate these phenomena in a consistent model where each focal contact can be translated into a force with known amplitude and direction, leading to quantitative predictions for cell motion in every condition. Altogether, our study shows how local and minutes timescale dynamics of focal adhesions and their distribution lead to long term cellular motion with simple geometric rules. ER -