Jamming and arrest of cell motion in biological tissues

TL;DR

This review explores the physical mechanisms behind cell motion arrest in tissues, emphasizing crowding, tension, and fluctuations, and highlights the importance of identifying dominant mechanisms in biological contexts.

Contribution

It identifies three key mechanisms driving cell jamming and proposes a phase diagram, integrating biological processes with physical theories of tissue arrest.

Findings

Three mechanisms: crowding, tension-driven rigidity, fluctuation reduction.

Proposed a phase diagram including all three mechanisms.

Emphasizes the need to identify dominant mechanisms in experiments.

Abstract

Collective cell motility is crucial to many biological processes including morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer invasion. Recently, the biology and biophysics communities have begun to use the term cell jamming to describe the collective arrest of cell motion in tissues. Although this term is widely used, the underlying mechanisms are varied. In this review, we highlight three independent mechanisms that can potentially drive arrest of cell motion -- crowding, tension-driven rigidity, and reduction of fluctuations -- and propose a speculative phase diagram that includes all three. Since multiple mechanisms may be operating simultaneously, this emphasizes that experiments should strive to identify which mechanism dominates in a given situation. We also discuss how specific cell-scale and molecular-scale biological processes, such as cell-cell and cell-substrate interactions, control aspects of these underlying physical mechanisms.