Spreading of an anchorage‐dependent cell on a selectively ligand‐coated substrate mediated by receptor‐ligand binding

A continuum model was proposed to simulate a biological cell adhering to a substrate surface domain with selectively coated ligands. Cell adhesion was modeled by a traction‐separation law depending on the receptor‐ligand distance and their densities. It was found that the obtained spreading patterns are consistent with published experimental data and that adhesion requires a nonuniform distribution of receptors at the spreading front with convex fronts requiring a much higher receptor density than concave fronts. Adhesion strength was also found to be more influential than adhesion energy on the spreading kinetics. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res, 2009