An analytical method for disentangling the roles of adhesion and crowding for random walk models on a crowded lattice

Migration of cells and molecules in vivo is affected by interactions with obstacles. These interactions can include crowding effects, as well as adhesion/repulsion between the motile cell/molecule and the obstacles. Here we present an analytical framework that can be used to separately quantify the roles of crowding and adhesion/repulsion using a lattice-based random walk model. Our method leads to an exact calculation of the long time Fickian diffusivity, and avoids the need for computationally expensive stochastic simulations.