Related papers: Collective Motility, Mechanical Waves, and Durotax…
The collective migration of epithelial groups of cells plays a central role in processes such as embryo development, wound healing, and cancer invasion. While finite cell clusters are known to collectively migrate in response to external…
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…
Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…
Biological cells are able to adapt their behaviour in response to environmental cues. Durotaxis is a phenomenon in which cells adjust their migration depending on the mechanical properties of a surrounding substrate. Although durotaxis has…
Movement of cell clusters along extracellular matrices (ECM) during tissue development, wound healing, and early stage of cancer invasion involve various inter-connected migration modes such as: (1) cell movement within clusters, (2)…
Most cells possess the capacity to locomote. Alone or collectively, this allows them to adapt, to rearrange, and to explore their surroundings. The biophysical characterization of such motile processes, in health and disease, has so far…
The directed migration of cells toward stiffer substrate regions or durotaxis is relevant to tissue development and tumor progression. Here, we introduce a phenomenological model for single cell durotaxis that incorporates both elastic…
The collective chemotaxis of multicellular clusters is an important phenomenon in various physiological contexts, ranging from embryonic development to cancer metastasis. Such clusters often display interesting shape dynamics and…
The colonisation of a soft passive material by motile cells such as bacteria is common in biology. The resulting colonies of the invading cells are often observed to exhibit intricate patterns whose morphology and dynamics can depend on a…
Coordinated rotational motion is an intriguing, yet still elusive mode of collective cell migration, which is relevant in pathological and morphogenetic processes. Most of the studies on this topic have been carried out on confined…
Cells move differently on substrates with different elasticities. In particular, the persistence time of their motion is higher on stiffer substrates. We show that this behavior will result in a net transport of cells directed up a…
Cells exhibit qualitatively different behaviors on substrates with different rigidities. The fact that cells are more polarized on the stiffer substrate motivates us to construct a two-dimensional cell with the distribution of focal…
Many animal cells change their shape depending on the stiffness of the substrate on which they are cultured: they assume small, rounded shapes in soft ECMs, they elongate within stiffer ECMs, and flatten out on hard substrates. Cells tend…
A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although…
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…
Collective cell migration is a key driver of embryonic development, wound healing, and some types of cancer invasion. Here we provide a physical perspective of the mechanisms underlying collective cell migration. We begin with a catalogue…
We study the dynamics of proliferating cell collectives whose microscopic constituents' growth is inhibited by macroscopic growth-induced stress. Discrete particle simulations of a growing collective show the emergence of concentric-ring…
Bacteria suspension exhibits a wide range of collective phenomena arising from interactions between individual cells. Here we show Serratia marcescens cells near an air-liquid interface spontaneously aggregate into dynamic clusters through…
Contact inhibition plays a crucial role in the motility of cells, the process of wound healing, and the formation of tumors. By mimicking the mechanical motion of calls crawling on a substrate using a pseudopod, we constructed a minimal…
Autologous chemotaxis is the process in which cells secrete and detect molecules to determine the direction of fluid flow. Experiments and theory suggest that autologous chemotaxis fails at high cell densities because molecules from other…