Related papers: Amoeboid-mesenchymal migration plasticity promotes…
Collective migration -- the directed, coordinated motion of many self-propelled agents -- is a fascinating emergent behavior exhibited by active matter that has key functional implications for biological systems. Extensive studies have…
Cell migration in confining physiological environments relies on the concerted dynamics of several cellular components, including protrusions, adhesions with the environment, and the cell nucleus. However, it remains poorly understood how…
Cell invasion and spatial pattern formation are two distinct manifestations of cellular self-organisation in development, regeneration, and disease. Here, we develop and analyse a unified theoretical framework that links these two seemingly…
Cells perform directed motion in response to external stimuli that they detect by sensing the environment with their membrane protrusions. In particular, several biochemical and biophysical cues give rise to tactic migration in the…
In the Drosophila melanogaster egg chamber, the collective migration of border cells toward the oocyte is guided by spatial gradients of chemoattractants. While cellular responses to these cues are well characterized, the spatial…
Adaptive therapy (AT) is designed to postpone the emergence of drug resistance by exploiting evolutionary competition among tumor subclones. Most mathematical models of AT assume a binary population structure of drug-sensitive and…
The internal and external mechanical environment plays an important role in tumorogenesis. As a proxy of an avascular early state tumor, we use multicellular spheroids, a composite material made of cells, extracellular matrix and permeating…
One of many important features of the tumour microenvironment is that it is a place of active Darwinian selection where different tumour clones become adapted to the variety of ecological niches that make up the microenvironment. These…
We study the growth of an implanted a-vascular tumor seed in two-dimensions based on a model where the mechanism of invasion is centered on tumor-induced acidification of the micro-environment and consequent death of normal cells. The…
Cell migration plays a fundamental role in numerous physiological processes, including embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. While cell-cell adhesion is known to regulate motion by shaping cell morphology and…
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…
In the absence of environmental cues, a migrating cell performs an isotropic random motion. Recently, the breaking of this isotropy has been observed when cells move in the presence of asymmetric adhesive patterns. However, up to now the…
Computational models have become an essential part of exploratory protocols in cell biology, as a complement to in vivo or in vitro experiments. These virtual models have the twofold advantage of enabling access to new types of data and…
It is widely recognized that reciprocal interactions between cells and their microenvironment, via mechanical forces and biochemical signaling pathways, regulate cell behaviors during normal development, homeostasis and disease progression…
We analyse a novel mathematical model of malignant invasion which takes the form of a two-phase moving boundary problem describing the invasion of a population of malignant cells into a population of background tissue, such as skin. Cells…
There is a widening recognition that cancer cells are products of complex developmental processes. Carcinogenesis and metastasis formation are increasingly described as systems-level, network phenomena. Here we propose that malignant…
Motivated by experimental observations, we develop a mathematical model of chemotactically directed tumor growth. We present an analytical study of the model as well as a numerical one. The mathematical analysis shows that: (i) tumor cell…
Background: Mechanotransduction in bone cells plays a pivotal role in osteoblast differentiation and bone remodelling. Mechanotransduction provides the link between modulation of the extracellular matrix and intracellular actions. By…
T cells use sophisticated shape dynamics (morphodynamics) to migrate towards and neutralise infected and cancerous cells. However, there is limited quantitative understanding of the migration process in 3D extracellular matrices (ECMs) and…
One of the hallmarks of pre-migratory tumors is the progressive loss of compact morphology. To investigate how tumors may intrinsically regulate their shape during growth, we employ a three-dimensional (3D) vertex model of multicellular…