On the mechanical interplay between intra- and inter-synchronization during collective cell migration: a numerical investigation

Collisions of deformable cells lead to collective migration

Collective migration of eukaryotic cells plays a fundamental role in tissue growth, wound healing and immune response. The motion, arising spontaneously or in response to chemical and mechanical stimuli, is also important for understanding life-threatening pathologies, such as cancer and metastasis formation. We present a phase-field model to describe the movement of many self-organized, interacting cells. The model takes into account the main mechanisms of cell motility - acto-myosin dynamics, as well as substrate-mediated and cell-cell adhesion. It predicts that collective cell migration emerges spontaneously as a result of inelastic collisions between neighboring cells: collisions lead to a mutual alignment of the cell velocities and to the formation of coherently-moving multi-cellular clusters. Small cell-to-cell adhesion, in turn, reduces the propensity for large-scale collective migration, while higher adhesion leads to the formation of moving bands. Our study provides valuable insight into biological processes associated with collective cell motility.

Collective cell migration induced by mechanical stress and substrate adhesiveness

Mechanical stress normal to the boundary of a tissue sheet can arise in both constrained as well as unconstrained epithelial layers through pushing and pulling of surrounding tissue and substrate adhesiveness, respectively. A continuum model is used to investigate how such stress influences the epithelial dynamics. Four types of spreading and motility can be identified: a uniformly stretched stationary state, uniform sheet migration, active stress compensation by polarization close to the boundary, and a wormlike progression by deformation waves. Analytical and numerical solutions are presented along with bifurcation diagrams using normal stress and active force as control parameters.