Possible Specificity of Cellular Interactions Due to Electrostatic Forces

Abstract

It is known that the cells from a mixed population in a culture medium will finally segregate. This “social behavior” of the cells is a direct consequence of both physical and chemical interactions between cells. The physical forces involved in cell-cell interactions are considered to be the electrostatic, van der Waals, and very-short-range hydration forces.

It has been believed until now that the electrostatic forces acting between identical cells were always repulsive and nonspecific. In the present work, we try to suggest that even the electrostatic forces could manifest a slightly specific character, so that a completely random Brownian motion of the cells could be influenced, corrected, and transformed into a “docking maneuver,” which could favor the specific interactions between cells suspended in a culture medium. The main point of our approach is that the peculiar patterns of electric charge distribution on the cell surfaces act like specific electrostatic fingerprints that could be responsible for the preferential interactions which precede cellular segregation (1).