Migration of adhesive glioma cells: front propagation and fingering

We investigate the migration of glioma cells as a front propagation phenomenon both theoretically (by using both discrete lattice modeling and a continuum approach) and experimentally. For small effective strength of cell-cell adhesion q, the front velocity does not depend on q. When q exceeds a critical threshold, a fingeringlike front propagation is observed due to cluster formation in the invasive zone. We show that the experiments correspond to the transient regime, before the regime of front propagation is established. We performed an additional experiment on cell migration. A detailed comparison with experimental observations showed that the theory correctly predicts the maximal migration distance but underestimates the migration of the main mass of cells.