Reconstruction of cellular forces in fibrous biopolymer network

How cells move through 3d extracellular matrix (ECM) is of increasing interest in attempts to understand important biological processes such as cancer metastasis. Just as in motion on 2d surfaces, it is expected that experimental measurements of cell-generated forces will provide valuable information for uncovering the mechanisms of cell migration. Here, we use a lattice-based mechanical model of ECM to study the cellular force reconstruction issue. We conceptually propose an efficient computational scheme to reconstruct cellular forces from the deformation and explore the performance of our scheme in presence of noise, varying marker bead distribution, varying bond stiffnesses and changing cell morphology. Our results show that micromechanical information, rather than merely the bulk rheology of the biopolymer networks, is essential for a precise recovery of cellular forces.