Motility-driven glass and jamming transitions in biological tissues

By Dapeng Bi, Xingbo Yang, M. Cristina Marchetti, M. Manning. Physical Review X, 2015

681 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cell motion inside dense tissues governs many biological processes, including embryonic development and cancer metastasis, and recent experiments suggest that these tissues exhibit collective glassy behavior. To make quantitative predictions about glass transitions in tissues, we study a self-propelled Voronoi (SPV) model that simultaneously captures polarized cell motility and multi-body cell-cell interactions in a confluent tissue, where there are no gaps between cells. We demonstrate that the model exhibits a jamming transition from a solid-like state to a fluid-like state that is controlled by three parameters: the single-cell motile speed, the persistence time of single-cell tracks, and a target shape index that characterizes the competition between cell-cell adhesion and cortical tension. In contrast to traditional particulate glasses, we are able to identify an experimentally accessible structural order parameter that specifies the entire jamming surface as a function of model parameters. We demonstrate that a continuum Soft Glassy Rheology model precisely captures this transition in the limit of small persistence times, and explain how it fails in the limit of large persistence times. These results provide a framework for understanding the collective solid-to-liquid transitions that have been observed in embryonic development and cancer progression, which may be associated with Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal transition in these tissues.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cell Biology, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/320c1a39886a84437353504429ecb911647ee603

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. 'Etienne Fodor
2. Le Yan
3. M. Cristina Marchetti
4. Dapeng Bi
5. V. Vitelli
6. William T. M. Irvine

In Cell Biology

1. 'Etienne Fodor
2. Le Yan
3. M. Cristina Marchetti
4. Dapeng Bi

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. 'Etienne Fodor
2. Le Yan
3. M. Cristina Marchetti
4. V. Vitelli
5. Dapeng Bi
6. William T. M. Irvine
7. Anton Souslov

Citations in the corpus

• The statistical physics of active matter: From self-catalytic colloids to living cells (2017, methodology): “This model, dubbed Self-Propelled Voronoi model (SPV), has been studied numerically and shown to exhibit a liquid–solid transition tuned by cell shape s0, cell motility v0 and the persistence τ = 1/Dr of single-cell dynamics [13].”
• Odd elasticity (2019, positive): “In this Letter, we lift this assumption and consider an additional contribution to the stiffness tensor absent in previous hydrodynamic theories of active matter [2–14]: Kijmn = K e ijmn + K o ijmn with K o ijmn = −K mnij , which is antisymmetric or odd under exchange of a pair of indices, in additi”
• Multicellular Rosettes Drive Fluid-solid Transition in Epithelial Tissues (2018, methodology): “However, the solid-fluid transition is still evidently shown in the Voronoi-based model with selfpropelling cells [9, 24].”