The impact of jamming on boundaries of collectively moving weak-interacting cells
By K. D. Nnetu, M. Knorr, J. Käs, M. Zink. 2012
108 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Collective cell migration is an important feature of wound healing, as well as embryonic and tumor development. The origin of collective cell migration is mainly intercellular interactions through effects such as a line tension preventing cells from detaching from the boundary. In contrast, in this study, we show for the first time that the formation of a constant cell front of a monolayer can also be maintained by the dynamics of the underlying migrating single cells. Ballistic motion enables the maintenance of the integrity of the sheet, while a slowed down dynamics and glass-like behavior cause jamming of cells at the front when two monolayers—even of the same cell type—meet. By employing a velocity autocorrelation function to investigate the cell dynamics in detail, we found a compressed exponential decay as described by the Kohlrausch–William–Watts function of the form , with 1.5 ⩽ β(t) ⩽ 1.8. This clearly shows that although migrating cells are an active, non-equilibrium system, the cell monolayer behaves in a glass-like way, which requires jamming as a part of intercellular interactions. Since it is the dynamics which determine the integrity of the cell sheet and its front for weakly interacting cells, it becomes evident why changes of the migratory behavior during epithelial to mesenchymal transition can result in the escape of single cells and metastasis.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cell Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2aaee064f31771d78a6d840c17e58d3d532d26a7
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Cell Biology
Citations in the corpus
- Motility-driven glass and jamming transitions in biological tissues (2015, background): “Most previous work on EMT/MET has focused, however, on properties and expression levels in single cells or pairs of cells, leaving open the interesting question of whether there is a collective aspect to these transitions: Are some features of EMT/MET generated by large numbers of interacting cells?”
- The statistical physics of active matter: From self-catalytic colloids to living cells (2017, background): “The study of active jamming and active glasses formed by dense collections of ABPs was largely stimulated by the experimental observation of glassy dynamics in monolayer of epithelial cells [81, 82, 83, 84].”