Related papers: Density fluctuations and border forces direct lead…
In tissue development, wound healing, and cancer invasion, coordinated cell motion arises from active forces produced by the cells. The relationship between force and motion remains unclear, however, because the forces result from a sum of…
Cancer cell migration between different body parts is the driving force behind cancer metastasis, which is the main cause of mortality of patients. Migration of cancer cells often proceeds by penetration through narrow cavities in locally…
Epithelial cells can assemble into cohesive colonies and collectively interact with substrates by generating extracellular forces through focal adhesions. Recently, a molecularly based thermodynamic model, which integrates both the…
Cell migration is important in many biological processes, including embryonic development, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In these tissues, a cell's motion is often strongly constrained by its neighbors, leading to glassy dynamics.…
The elastic moduli of tissues are connected to their states of health and function. The epithelial monolayer is a simple, minimal, tissue model that is often used to gain understanding of mechanical behavior at the cellular or…
Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…
T1 transitions, which are localised cell rearrangements, play an important role in the fluidization of epithelial monolayers. Using a multi-phase field model and an active elastic solid model, we show that although each cell undergoes T1…
Epithelial cell layers on soft elastic substrates or pillar arrays are commonly used as model systems for investigating the role of force in tissue growth, maintenance and repair. Here we show analytically that the experimentally observed…
Cells frequently employ extracellular vesicles, or exosomes, to signal across long distances and coordinate collective actions. Exosomes diffuse slowly, can be actively degraded, and contain stochastic amounts of molecular cargo. These…
In this work we approach cell migration under a large-scale assumption, so that the system reduces to a particle in motion. Unlike classical particle models, the cell displacement results from its internal activity: the cell velocity is a…
Transitions between solid-like and fluid-like states in living tissues have been found in steps of embryonic development and in stages of disease progression. Our current understanding of these transitions has been guided by experimental…
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…
We analyse a multi-phase field model for an epithelial monolayer with pairwise adhesions between neighbouring cells following an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, representing the stochastic turnover of junctional molecular motors. These…
Migratory and tissue resident cells exhibit highly branched morphologies to perform their function and to adapt to the microenvironment. Immune cells, for example, display transient branched shapes while exploring the surrounding tissues.…
Many critical biological processes, like wound healing, require confluent cell monolayers/bulk tissues to transition from a jammed solid-like to a fluid-like state. Although numerical studies anticipate changes in the cell shape alone can…
Cell alignment often forms nematic order, which can lead to anomalous collective cell flow due to the so-called active force. Although it is appreciated that cell migration is driven by traction force, a quantitative evaluation of the…
We investigate the collective behavior of motile rods immersed in a monolayer of apolar rods confined between vertically vibrating plates using numerical simulations. We uncover an antidiffusive instability whereby motile rods segregate…
We perform cell segmentation on images from experimental studies of confluent, mobile cells in epithelial monolayers and show that these systems possess a broad, positively-skewed shape parameter distribution $P(\mathcal{A})$, where…
Although cell monolayers typically remain confluent, they can spontaneously develop persistent holes as a result of collective cellular motion. Recent studies on MDCK monolayers cultured on soft substrates have revealed that cells can align…
We use a computational phase-field model together with analytical analysis to study how inter-cellular active forces can mediate individual cell morphology and collective motion in a confluent cell monolayer. Contractile inter-cellular…