Collective Cell Migration: Leadership, Invasion and Segregation

TL;DR

This paper presents a computational framework demonstrating that simple cell motility and mechanical interactions can produce diverse collective behaviors observed in biological processes like development and cancer invasion.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile in-silico model showing minimal requirements for coordinated cell migration, emphasizing the role of physical interactions over biochemical signalling.

Findings

Cell motility and mechanical interactions alone can generate collective behaviors.

Emergence of leader-follower dynamics and sheet migration in simulations.

Insights into how mechanical coordination influences cancer invasion.

Abstract

A number of biological processes, such as embryo development, cancer metastasis or wound healing, rely on cells moving in concert. The mechanisms leading to the emergence of coordinated motion remain however largely unexplored. Although biomolecular signalling is known to be involved in most occurrences of collective migration, the role of physical and mechanical interactions has only been recently investigated. In this paper, a versatile framework for cell motility is implemented in-silico in order to study the minimal requirements for the coordination of a group of epithelial cells. We find that cell motility and cell-cell mechanical interactions are sufficient to generate a broad array of behaviours commonly observed in vitro and in vivo. Cell streaming, sheet migration and susceptibility to leader cells are examples of behaviours spontaneously emerging from these simple assumptions, which might explain why collective effects are so ubiquitous in nature. This analysis provides also new insights into cancer metastasis and cell sorting, suggesting in particular that collective invasion might result from an emerging coordination in a system where single cells are mechanically unable to invade.