The role of the nucleus for cell mechanics: an elastic phase field approach

The nucleus of eukaryotic cells typically makes up around 30 % of the cell volume and tends to be up to ten times stiffer than the surrounding cytoplasm. Therefore it is an important element for cell mechanics, but a quantitative understanding of its mechanical role is largely missing. Here we demonstrate that elastic phase fields can be used to describe dynamical cell processes in adhesive or confining environments in which the nucleus plays an important role. We first introduce and verify our computational method and then study several applications of large relevance. For cells on adhesive patterns, we find that nuclear stress is shielded by the adhesive pattern. For cell compression between two parallel plates, we obtain force-compression curves that allow us to extract an effective modulus for the cell-nucleus composite. For micropipette aspiration, the effect of the nucleus on the effective modulus is found to be much weaker, highlighting the complicated interplay between extracellular geometry and cell mechanics that is captured by our approach.