Physical Models of Collective Cell Migration

By Ricard Alert, X. Trepat. Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, 2019

352 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 catalog of the cell–cell and cell–substrate interactions that govern cell migration, which we classify into positional and orientational interactions. We then review the physical models that have been developed to explain how these interactions give rise to collective cellular movement. These models span the subcellular to the supracellular scales, and they include lattice models, phase-field models, active network models, particle models, and continuum models. For each type of model, we discuss its formulation, its limitations, and the main emergent phenomena that it has successfully explained. These phenomena include flocking and fluid–solid transitions, as well as wetting, fingering, and mechanical waves in spreading epithelial monolayers. We close by outlining remaining challenges and future directions in the physics of collective cell migration.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cell Biology, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc4ee316860b6f3476e548a70bed6127ab35f557

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

In Cell Biology

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Scalar Active Mixtures: The Nonreciprocal Cahn-Hilliard Model (2020, background): “The study of active matter [1, 2] has by now permeated across many scientific fields, length scales, and time scales, ranging from the study of catalytic enzymes [3–5] and the cytoskeleton [6] inside cells, to the collective motion of cells in tissues [7] and suspensions of bacteria [8, 9], all the ”
Symmetry, Thermodynamics, and Topology in Active Matter (2021, background): “These couplings play an essential role in the transmission of spatial information in large cell monolayers, which are often mediated by travelling waves, pulses, and a tug of war between cell-cell and cell-substrate forces [210, 211].”
Active Turbulence (2021, background): “In fact, polarity-velocity misalignment occurs in systems such as Janus colloids [69] and epithelial monolayers [70–72], in which cells polarize in response to mechanical stresses and environmental cues [72].”