Emergent catch bonds from slip-like contacts: cooperative force-driven proofreading at receptor--ligand interfaces

Mechanical forces modulate receptor-ligand kinetics, sometimes producing the so-called catch bond: a tensile force strengthens the bond, whereas in most cases engagement time is reduced (a slip bond). Multiple phenomenological models reproduce catch-slip behavior between receptors and ligands, primarily by positing how the reaction's free-energy landscape changes under applied forces. In this paper, we show that distinct microscopic mechanisms often collapse into mathematically equivalent multi-exponential forms. This operational equivalence makes them difficult to distinguish (or even falsify) based solely on bond survival curves. We expose this mathematical equivalence and the validity regimes of these reductions and introduce \emph{c}ooperative \emph{f}orce-driven \emph{p}roof\emph{r}eading (CFPR), a network-level mechanism where pulling geometry enables contact-zone reorganization and additional nucleation of residue binding contributions, generating emergent catch-like responses from individually slip-like residue binding contributions. Our model can incorporate data from molecular dynamics simulations to predict, in advance, whether catch-slip will be present in a system and under what conditions, making it a predictive tool that complements experimental data.