Collective cell migration: leadership, invasion and segregation

Area of Science:

• Cell Biology
• Biophysics
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Coordinated cell movement is crucial for biological processes like embryo development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis.
• While biomolecular signaling is recognized, the role of physical and mechanical interactions in collective cell migration is less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the minimal requirements for coordinated epithelial cell group motility using an in silico framework.
• To explore how cell motility and cell-cell mechanical interactions contribute to collective cell behaviors.

Main Methods:

• Implementation of a versatile computational framework to simulate cell motility.
• Analysis of emergent behaviors such as cell streaming, sheet migration, and leader cell susceptibility.
• Investigation of the influence of population size and confinement on coordination.

Main Results:

• Cell motility and mechanical interactions alone can generate diverse collective behaviors observed in vitro and in vivo.
• Behaviors like cell streaming, sheet migration, and leader cell effects emerge spontaneously from simple assumptions.
• Population size and confinement are key factors in coordinating cell movement.

Conclusions:

• Simple physical and mechanical interactions are sufficient to explain ubiquitous collective cell migration phenomena.
• The correlation length of the velocity field predicts complex population responses.
• Collective invasion in cancer metastasis may arise from emergent coordination when individual cells lack invasive capacity.