title: Effective viscosity and dynamics of spreading epithelia: a solvable model.
abstract: Collective cell migration in spreading epithelia in controlled environments has become a landmark in our current understanding of fundamental biophysical processes in development, regeneration, wound healing or cancer. Epithelial monolayers are treated as thin layers of a viscous fluid that exert active traction forces on the substrate. The model is exactly solvable and shows a broad range of applicabilities for the quantitative analysis and interpretation of force microscopy data of monolayers from a variety of experiments and cell lines. In addition, the proposed model provides physical insights into how the biological regulation of the tissue is encoded in a reduced set of time-dependent physical parameters. In particular the temporal evolution of the effective viscosity entails a mechanosensitive regulation of adhesion. Besides, the observation of an effective elastic tensile modulus can be interpreted as an emergent phenomenon in an active fluid.
authors.affiliation: Departament de Física de la Matèria Condensada, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona 08028, Spain. carles.blanch-mercader@curie.fr and Laboratoire Physico Chimie Curie, Institut Curie, PSL Research University, CNRS, 26 rue d' Ulm, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: C
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1536-8548
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Blanch-Mercader
authors.affiliation: Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona 08028, Spain.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vincent
authors.affiliation: Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona 08028, Spain.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bazellières
authors.affiliation: Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona 08028, Spain and Unitat de Biofísica i Bioenginyeria, Facultat de Medicina, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona 08036, Spain.
authors.forename: X
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Serra-Picamal
authors.affiliation: Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona 08028, Spain and Unitat de Biofísica i Bioenginyeria, Facultat de Medicina, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona 08036, Spain and Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona 08010, Spain and Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red en Bioingeniería, Biomateriales y Nanomedicina, 28029 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: X
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Trepat
authors.affiliation: Departament de Física de la Matèria Condensada, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona 08028, Spain. carles.blanch-mercader@curie.fr and Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS), Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Casademunt