Soft matrices suppress cooperative behaviors among receptor-ligand bonds in cell adhesion

The fact that biological tissues are stable over prolonged periods of time while individual receptor-ligand bonds only have limited lifetime underscores the critical importance of cooperative behaviors of multiple molecular bonds, in particular the competition between the rate of rupture of closed bonds (death rate) and the rate of rebinding of open bonds (birth rate) in a bond cluster. We have recently shown that soft matrices can greatly increase the death rate in a bond cluster by inducing severe stress concentration near the adhesion edges. In the present paper, we report a more striking effect that, irrespective of stress concentration, soft matrices also suppress the birth rate in a bond cluster by increasing the local separation distance between open bonds. This is shown by theoretical analysis as well as Monte Carlo simulations based on a stochastic-elasticity model in which stochastic descriptions of molecular bonds and elastic descriptions of interfacial force/separation are unified in a single modeling framework. Our findings not only are important for understanding the role of elastic matrices in cell adhesion, but also have general implications on adhesion between soft materials.