  Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are
responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions
can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on
adhesive substrates. To address how these shape changes affect cell migration
and cell speed we model motility using deformable, 2D cross-sections of cells
in which adhesion and frictional forces between cell and substrate can be
varied separately. Our simulations show that increasing the adhesion results in
increased spreading of cells and larger cell speeds. We propose an analytical
model which shows that the cell speed is inversely proportional to an effective
height of the cell and that increasing this height results in increased
internal shear stress. The numerical and analytical results are confirmed in
experiments on motile eukaryotic cells.
