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for The non-equilibrium thermodynamics and kinetics of focal adhesion dynamics

===Krishna Garikipati===
===University of Michigan===

Focal adhesions are specific structures by which certain cell types, such as fibroblasts, attach to substrates. Focal adhesions demonstrate a rich range of dynamic behavior, whose full understanding will aid the further investigation of cell migration, cytoskeletal dynamics, mitosis, and stem cell differentiation. The free energy that drives growth, resorption and sliding of focal adhesions includes mechanical and chemical contributions.  We have identified a competition among four chemo-mechanical effects that control focal adhesion dynamics, and have developed a theoretical treatment of these dynamics in the framework of kinetic processes driven by classical non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
In the resulting model, the mechanisms governed by the chemo-mechanical effects allow focal adhesions to exhibit a rich variety of behavior without the need to introduce special constitutive assumptions for their response. In this treatment, the structural unit of focal adhesions is a complex consisting of a ligand such as fibronectin, an integrin molecule, and associated plaque proteins. The binding and unbinding of these complexes causes focal adhesion growth and resorption, respectively. The reaction-limited case is considered. Our central findings are that growth, resorption and sliding are all predicted by a very simple chemo-mechanical model, with particular attention paid to symmetry-breaking mechanisms.

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