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Myxococcus xanthus Gliding Motors Are Elastically Coupled to the Substrate as Predicted by the Focal Adhesion Model of Gliding Motility
Figure 3
Strong adhesive attachments between cell and substrate are required to match experimental observations.
(A) Maximum change in primary cell orientation (
) as a function of the strength of substrate attachments (
). Red band represents the range of bond strengths observed for integrin bonds in other biological systems (22–24). Horizontal solid line (
) represents the mean value of change in primary cell orientation from experimental cell collisions after subtracting the spontaneous cell turning and the dashed lines represent one standard deviation variation in the experimental data. (B) Same as (A) but with mean and standard deviation from aggregated simulations with varied model parameters. (C) The minimum adhesive strength of attachments matching experimental data closely matches with the cell propulsion force. Error bars represent variation in the results for different cell flexibilities. (D) The distribution of 
values in experimental data of wild-type cells (DK1622, collision events, N = 97) and (E) cells lacking twitching motility (DK10407, N = 58). (F) The distribution of spontaneous cell orientation change for mean cell collision time of ∼2.9 min measured from trajectories of isolated cells (DK1622, N = 4018, see Fig. S4A for additional details).
doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003619.g003