Inferring three-body interactions in cell migration dynamics

TL;DR

This study develops a method to detect three-body interactions in cell migration, revealing their minor but present influence, and supports the predominance of pairwise interactions in collective cell dynamics.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new inference scheme to identify three-body interactions from trajectory data in cell migration, challenging the assumption that interactions are purely pairwise.

Findings

Evidence of three-body interactions in one cell line.

Three-body interactions only cause minor corrections to dynamics.

Methodology enables detection of higher-order interactions from data.

Abstract

In active matter and living matter, such as clusters of migrating cells, collective dynamics emerges from the underlying interactions. A common assumption of theoretical descriptions of collective cell migration is that these interactions are pairwise additive. It remains unclear, however, if the dynamics of groups of cells is solely determined by pairwise interactions, or if higher-order interaction terms come into play. To investigate this question, we use time-lapse microscopy to record the dynamics of three cells interacting together in a linear three-site geometry. We collect a large number of cellular trajectories and develop an inference scheme to infer both pairwise and potential three-body cell-cell interactions. Our results reveal evidence of three-body interactions in one of the two cell lines tested. However, these three-body interactions only introduce minor corrections to the overall dynamics. Our work provides a methodology to infer the existence of three-body interactions from trajectory data, and supports the commonly assumed pairwise nature of cell-cell interactions.