Modeling closure of circular wounds through coordinated collective motion

Wound healing enables tissues to restore their original states, and is achieved through collective cell migration into the wound space, contraction of the wound edge via an actomyosin filament 'purse-string,' as well as cell division. Recently, experimental techniques have been developed to create wounds with various regular morphologies in epithelial monolayers, and these experiments of circular closed-contour wounds support coordinated lamellipodial cell crawling as the predominant driver of gap closure. Through utilizing a particle-based mechanical tissue simulation, exhibiting long-range coordination of cell motility, we computationally model these closed-contour experiments with a high level of agreement between experimentally observed and simulated wound closure dynamics and tissue velocity profiles. We also determine the sensitivity of wound closure time in the model to changes in cell motility force and division rate. Our simulation results confirm that circular wounds can close due to collective cell migration without the necessity for a purse-string mechanism or for cell division, and show that the alignment mechanism of cellular motility force with velocity, leading to collective motion in the model, may speed up wound closure.