Mechanical feedback controls the emergence of dynamical memory in growing tissue monolayers

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimal 2D model showing how mechanical feedback via a critical pressure influences tissue growth, leading to persistent force correlations and dynamical memory effects in cell monolayers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel minimal model demonstrating how mechanical feedback controls dynamical memory in growing tissues, highlighting non-equilibrium force correlations.

Findings

Force autocorrelation functions show persistent temporal correlations.

Memory effects increase with higher critical pressure p_c.

Cells exhibit diffusive behavior driven by self-generated active forces.

Abstract

The growth of a tissue, which depends on cell-cell interactions and biologically relevant process such as cell division and apoptosis, is regulated by a mechanical feedback mechanism. We account for these effects in a minimal two-dimensional model in order to investigate the consequences of mechanical feedback, which is controlled by a critical pressure, $p_c$. A cell can only grow and divide if the pressure it experiences, due to interaction with its neighbors, is less than $p_c$. Because temperature is an irrelevant variable in the model, the cell dynamics is driven by self-generated active forces (SGAFs) that are created by cell division. It is shown that even in the absence of intercellular interactions, cells undergo diffusive behavior. The SGAF driven diffusion is indistinguishable from the well-known dynamics of a free Brownian particle at a fixed finite temperature. When intercellular interactions are taken into account, we find persistent temporal correlations in the force-force autocorrelation function ($FAF$) that extends over timescale of several cell division times. The time-dependence of the $FAF$ reveals memory effects, which increases as pc increases. The observed non-Markovian effects emerge due to the interplay of cell division and mechanical feedback, and is inherently a non-equilibrium phenomenon.