The impact of contact inhibition on collective cell migration and proliferation

TL;DR

This study uses a multiphase field model to analyze how contact inhibition affects the growth, migration, and mechanical interactions within cell colonies, providing insights into cellular dynamics and comparing results with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a multiphase field model that incorporates contact inhibition mechanisms to quantitatively analyze cell colony dynamics and compare migrating versus non-migrating cells.

Findings

Quantitative characterization of colony boundary velocity

Analysis of single cell velocities and neighbor distributions

Influence of stress and age on cell positions

Abstract

Contact inhibition limits migration and proliferation of cells in cell colonies. We consider a multiphase field model to investigate the growth dynamics of a cell colony, composed of proliferating cells. The model takes into account the mechanisms of contact inhibition of locomotion and proliferation by local mechanical interactions. We compare non-migrating and migrating cells, in order to provide a quantitative characterization of the dynamics and analyse the velocity of the colony boundary for both cases. Additionally, we measure single cell velocities, number of neighbour distributions, as well as the influence of stress and age on positions of the cells and with respect to each other. We further compare the findings with experimental data for Madin-Darby canine kidney cells