Quantifying the roles of random motility and directed motility using advection-diffusion theory for a 3T3 fibroblast cell migration assay stimulated with an electric field.

We find that the simplest linear advection term in a continuum model of directed cell motility is sufficient to describe a range of different electrotaxis experiments for 3T3 fibroblast cells subject to normal physiological values of the electric field. This is useful information because alternative models that include saturation effects involve additional parameters that need to be estimated before a partial differential equation model can be applied to interpret or predict a cell migration experiment.