Microscale mechanisms of cell migration
Revealed the biophysical mechanisms of cell sense extracellular
Inspired by past insights into multiscale problems, including the establishment of cross-scale theories (Lin & Wei, 2020) and multiscale mechanisms of viscoelasticity in biological tissues (Lin et al., 2025), we investigated a more microscopic biomechanical issue: cell migration in viscous environments (Lin et al., 2026). We investigated how the actin filament network responds to external viscous environments, leading to faster migration rates in high-viscosity (high-resistance) conditions. Furthermore, we explained the migration rate memory effect arising from cytoskeletal dynamics.
Figure 1: The mechanobiological diagram of actin filaments response to the viscous extracellular environment.