Home▸Biophysics▸Cell Motility: Actin Polymerization and Crawling

🧬 Cell Motility: Actin Polymerization and Crawling

Interactive 3D cell leading edge where users adjust actin polymerization rate and adhesion strength to watch treadmilling filaments drive lamellipodial crawling across a substrate.

Biophysics2DAdvanced60 FPS

An interactive 3D leading edge where actin filaments treadmill — growing at the membrane and disassembling farther back — while focal adhesions grip the substrate and convert that polymerization force into forward crawling.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Net crawl speed depends on the balance between actin polymerization pushing the membrane forward and retrograde flow pulling the network backward, mediated by how strongly focal adhesions "clutch" the substrate.

🎮 How to Use

Raise polymerization rate to push the leading edge harder, tune adhesion strength to see the molecular clutch engage or slip, and toggle Arp2/3 branching to compare a dense dendritic meshwork against sparse, unbranched filaments.

💡 Did You Know?

Cells often crawl fastest at intermediate adhesion strength — too little grip wastes polymerization force as pure retrograde flow, too much grip stalls the network under load.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D cell leading edge where users adjust actin polymerization rate and adhesion strength to watch treadmilling filaments drive lamellipodial crawling across a substrate.

actin-polymerizationcell-crawlinglamellipodiacytoskeletonbiophysicscell-motility

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install