title: Collisions of deformable cells lead to collective migration.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Hardenbergstrasse 36, EW 7-1, Technische Universität Berlin, 10623 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Jakob
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Löber
authors.affiliation: 1] Physikalisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Hermann-Herder-Strasse 3, 79104 Freiburg, Germany [2] Institut Charles Sadron, CNRS-UPR22, 23 rue du Loess, 67034 Strasbourg Cedex 2, France.
authors.forename: Falko
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ziebert
authors.affiliation: 1] Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Avenue, Argonne, IL 60439, USA [2] Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60202, USA.
authors.forename: Igor S
authors.initials: IS
authors.lastname: Aranson
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002465:Cell Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D008962:Models, Theoretical