Role of cytoskeletal mechanics in wound healing in the single-celled Stentor coeruleus

Wound healing in multicellular tissues is well studied, but the corresponding mechanisms in individual cells remain largely unexplored. Understanding single-cell wound repair reveals how biological cells recover from mechanical damage and offers design principles for synthetic systems. The large unicellular ciliate Stentor coeruleus serves as an ideal model due to its remarkable ability to recover from substantial structural injury. Stentor’s mechanical resilience arises from its cytoskeletal network of extensile microtubule bundles mechanically coupled to calcium-triggered contractile elements, modeled here as a composite fiber network. Using equilibrium energy minimization and overdamped Langevin simulations of lattice-based elastic networks, we examine the healing of strip wounds in both the mechanically and thermally dominated regimes. Our results show that strip wounds are healed substantially by microtubule extension, and healing of wounds aligned with the microtubules leads to larger global cell elongation, consistent with experiments on laser-ablated Stentor. This work highlights the mechanical basis of single-cell wound healing.