Alignment interactions drive structural transitions in biological tissues
Matteo Paoluzzi1, Luca Angelani2,3, Giorgio Gosti4
1Departament de Física de la Matèria Condensada, Universitat de Barcelona, C. Martí Franquès 1, 08028 Barcelona, Spain.
Abstract:
Experimental evidence shows that there is a feedback between cell shape and cell motion. How this feedback impacts the collective behavior of dense cell monolayers remains an open question. We investigate the effect of a feedback that tends to align the cell crawling direction with cell elongation in a biological tissue model. We find that the alignment interaction promotes nematic patterns in the fluid phase that eventually undergo a nonequilibrium phase transition into a quasihexagonal solid. Meanwhile, highly asymmetric cells do not undergo the liquid-to-solid transition for any value of the alignment coupling. In this regime, the dynamics of cell centers and shape fluctuation show features typical of glassy systems.
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