Related papers: Collective chemotaxis through noisy multicellular …
Cell-to-cell variability is inherent to numerous biological processes, including cell migration. Quantifying and characterizing the variability of migrating cells is challenging, as it requires monitoring many cells for long time windows…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…
We present a simple model that describes the motion of a single chemotactic cell exposed to a traveling wave of the chemoattractant. The model incorporates two types of responses to stimulation by the chemoattractant, i.e., change in…
Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…
Most sensory cells use cross-membrane chemoreceptors to detect chemical signals in the environment. The biochemical properties and spatial organization of chemoreceptors play important roles in achieving and maintaining sensitivity and…
Many types of motile cells perform durotaxis, namely, directed migration following gradients of substrate stiffness. Recent experiments have revealed that cell monolayers can migrate toward stiffer regions even when individual cells do not…
Living cells are capable of interacting with their environments in a variety of ways, including cell signalling, adhesion, and directed motion. These behaviours are often mediated by receptor molecules embedded in the cell membrane, which…
Epithelial cell clusters often move collectively on a substrate. Mechanical signals play a major role in organizing this behavior. There are a number of experimental observations in these systems which await a comprehensive explanation.…
Swarming or collective motion of living entities is one of the most common and spectacular manifestations of living systems having been extensively studied in recent years. A number of general principles have been established. The…
Cell migration in vivo is often guided by chemical signals. Such chemotaxis, such as performed by immune cells migrating to a wound site, is complicated by the complex geometry inside living tissues. In this study, we extend our theoretical…
The creation of synthetic systems that emulate the defining properties of living matter, such as motility, gradient-sensing, signalling and replication, is a grand challenge of biomimetics. Such imitations of life crucially contain active…
Self-generated gradients have atttracted a lot of attention in the recent biological literature. It is considered as a robust strategy for a group of cells to find its way during a long journey. This note is intended to discuss various…
We introduce a generic, purely mechanical model for environment sensitive motion of mammalian cells that is applicable to chemotaxis, haptotaxis, and durotaxis as modes of motility. It is able to theoretically explain all relevant…
Various molecules exclusively accumulate at the front or back of migrating eukaryotic cells in response to a shallow gradient of extracellular signals. Directional sensing and signal amplification highlight the essential properties in the…
Tumor cells invade individually or in groups, mediated by mechanical interactions between cells and their surrounding matrix. These multicellular dynamics are reminiscent of leader-follower coordination and epithelial-mesenchymal…
Cells collectively migrate as a cluster in three-dimensional (3D) tissues, such as in embryogenesis and cancer invasion. Here, numerical simulations using a 3D vertex model show that polarized interfacial tension, expressing cell adhesion…
In many sensory systems, transmembrane receptors are spatially organized in large clusters. Such arrangement may facilitate signal amplification and the integration of multiple stimuli. However, this organization likely also affects the…
A wide array of biological systems can navigate in shallow gradients of chemoattractant with remarkable precision. Whilst previous approaches model such systems using coarse-grained chemical density profiles, we construct a dynamical model…
Self-generated gradients (SGG) provide robust steering cues that guide cells in their long-distance expeditions during embryonic development, immune response, and cancer metastasis. Cells generate their own local, dynamic gradients by…
Collective motion of cells is critical to some of the most vital tasks including wound healing, development, and immune response [Friedl and Gilmour 2009; Tokarski et al. 2012; Lee et al. 2012; Beltman et al. 2009], and is common to many…