Abstract

An underlying in vitro study with a synthetic actomyosin cortex has shown that the cortex organizes into spatial clusters for a medium ATP concentrations. Here we developed a spatial distributed model that captures the viscoelastic material behavior and the kinetics of a simplified myosin cross bridge model. Further, we suggest a formulation for the contractile stress produced by the myofilament myosin II. We demonstrate that the spatial pattern generated by the model is consistent with the experimental observations, including an absence of contraction for low and high ATP concentrations.