Adhesion in the context of mechanical attachment, signaling, and movement in
cellular dynamics is mediated by the kinetic interactions between membraneembedded proteins in an aqueous environment. Here, we present a minimal theoretical framework for the dynamics of membrane adhesion that accounts for the kinetics
of protein binding, the elastic deformation of the membrane, and the hydrodynamics
of squeeze flow in the membrane gap. We analyze the resulting equations using
scaling estimates to characterize the spatiotemporal features of the adhesive patterning and corroborate them using numerical simulations. In addition to characterizing
aspects of cellular dynamics, our results might also be applicable to a range of
phenomena in physical chemistry and materials science where flow, deformation,
and kinetics are coupled to each other in slender geometries.